The best way to predict the future is to create it. With the help of leadership coaching, leaders can identify and exploit trends like digitization and an ever-increasing need for organizational flexibility.

Horizontal, decentralized organizational hierarchies are keys to creating flexible organizations ready to harness disruption and thrive amid the challenges of the future.

“A leader’s job is to look into the future and see the organization, not as it is, but as it should be.” – Jack Welch. 

Leadership has been moving away from top-down, authoritarian structures since the beginning of the post-industrial age. The trend of horizontal, flexible, collaborative leadership will continue to shape organizational structures for the foreseeable future. In addition to it, factors like accelerating disruption, change, and digitization will predictably also play a role.

The pace of leadership is picking up. 

Catering to the Needs of a Modern-age Workforce through Servant Leadership

The stock of servant leadership has been rising for a while, and it’s bound to skyrocket in the future. In a modern, intelligent organization, the role of the leader is not to command and keep people in line. Intelligent leaders can exert influence over their followers beyond formal authority. And the best trust- and influence-building tool in their arsenal is service. Successful leaders emulate and encourage a leadership coaching-like mentality in their employees.

Intelligent leaders are facilitators as well as sources of inspiration and genuine support.

The modern workforce is no longer the sum of drone-minded, brick-in-the-wall entities it used to be. Digital workers enjoy unprecedented mobility and access to opportunities.  People want more from their organizations than opportunities, business capabilities, flexibility, and good compensation. Digital workers want their organizations to reflect their values and concerns.

Such expectations redefine how leaders exert influence and wield power in the organizations of the future.

The Quickening Pace of Change and Disruption

Technology and innovation have always been among the main drivers of business. Leadership and leadership coaching must support and promote mindsets that enable people to handle and harness change. Since technology tends to build upon itself, its development is parabolic rather than linear. The better it gets, the quicker technology can supplant itself with something even better.

The unenviable role of the leader of the future is to keep pace with accelerating disruption. Executive coaching focuses on helping leaders adopt change-focused mindsets quickly for a reason: such a mindset will be indispensable for the leaders of the future.

Business coaching professionals are well-aware that it will take more than a change-friendly mindset on the part of the leader to keep organizations astride the ever-intensifying waves of disruption the future will bring. To successfully handle change in the future, organizations will also need:

• More fluidity. Project-based work, the approach that will allow teams to tackle the diverse challenges of the future, requires flat, post-hierarchical structures. Such structures facilitate quick decision-making through the combined powers of empowerment and decentralization.
• Enhanced collaboration. Flat, hierarchy-free, decentralized organizations collaborate more effectively to achieve shared goals.
• Effective talent-sharing. Creating coaching-focused, flexible workforces allows leaders to fill skill gaps through-talent sharing and address short-term projects with optimal resources.
• Refined human capital strategies. Digitization has already transformed talent recruitment and retention and will likely continue to exert an oversized influence. Organizations will have to adopt new benchmarking, tools and data processing techniques, to keep up.

Reinventing Existing Products and Services and Creating New Ones

Leaders and executive coaching professionals of the future will have to adopt new ways of overcoming organizational resistance to change.

“Even in a world of accelerating change, it is still difficult to convince people that the new ways of doing things can be better and cheaper.” – Grace Murray Hopper. 

Executive coaching will play a significant role in helping leaders deal with resistance to change and promoting a coaching mindset among their peers and reports.

Technologies like IoT (the Internet of Things), artificial intelligence, blockchain, and cloud computing will shape the businesses of the future.

Innovation has always been one of the main motors of business success. 

Successfully digitizing by adopting these technologies depends on the ability of employees to adapt.

Leadership and business coaching can help the leaders of the future bridge the gap of a lack of expertise to lead through the digitization process. Coaching can also help leaders find alternative solutions to digitizing such as addressing the skill gap through outsourcing.

 

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