Yesterday I read Dorothy Dalton’s great post: “Career Path replaced by Cluster Career.” If you’re thinking about how to plan your career, this is a must read. But it got me to thinking about how we do leadership development in a very different world.
Leadership development for a different way to climb
Forget the career ladder. These days it’s more like a rock climbing wall. You get a foothold on one assignment. Then you push yourself up to grab a new position with a different company. Sometimes you move sideways so you will be able to move up more easily later. How do we help leaders with that kind of climbing?
Leadership development for virtual leadership
Today’s leader is likely to lead teams that stretch across borders and time zones. He or she is likely to have team members who work from home some of the time. How do we help leaders deal effectively with those situations when every bit of distance and time displacement makes things harder?
Leadership development for emergent leadership
In those thrilling days of yesteryear, some people had leadership positions and others did not. No more. Now there’s emergent leadership to go with positional leadership. How do we prepare leaders to know when to step up and when to step back?
This is only the beginning. Peter Drucker said that we can only know two things about the future. We can’t know it in detail and it will be different from today. How do we develop leaders for that unknown future?
Hi Wally – thanks for your kind words. The world of work and revenue generation is shifting. This means that anyone dealing with the workforce will require the same shift. Hiring and talent assessment processes will be different. Teams maybe composed of individuals who may only be project team members – with no long term affiliation to an organisation. That will require a different set of leadership skills to the ones that we currently expect.
Super post!