Whether they’re planning to tackle pressing global issues, improving human health or pushing the boundaries of the capabilities of technology, the leaders of tomorrow will be moulded by the leaders of today. In today’s global environment of ever-changing trends and perceived instability, it is the responsibility of today’s leaders to instil inherent guiding principles that help breed success of future businesses and the success of the teams they are currently leading.
But what are these guiding principles and how can we encourage the leaders of tomorrow to embed them into their way of thinking, in a language they can understand and execute?
Four principles hold true to me as I continue to navigate life and its challenges.
The leaders of tomorrow are growing up in a social media echo-chamber of manufactured social profiles. A significant proportion of people online don’t authentically publish their ‘real life’– often using social channels as the ‘highlight reel.’ Depending on how deeply these individuals ‘live’ this life, they may begin to lose their authentic self. This coupled with today’s societal trends of generally reduced patience, attention spans, and lack of fact checking often leads us down a path of perception at face value, and the superficial rather than genuine.
We must teach the next generation of leaders to embrace the fact that everybody has strengths and weaknesses, even the greatest pioneering leaders. But that alone is not what matters. It’s the ability to recognise who you (and others) are and what drives the authentic self that will make the difference. In my rather eclectic career living in multiple counties across the globe, I’ve often found that the individuals who excel and thrive have clearly identified their self, passion points, and strengths - achieved through a huge sense of self-awareness. Recognising and understanding what authentically drives you, whilst making peace with your weaknesses and learning to fill the gaps with people or an environment that compensates this gap is a practice that great leaders consistently carry out throughout their lives.
Steve Jobs said, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room”. The Apple founder famously never wrote a single line of code, but by embracing complete self-awareness he knew his strengths lay in experience, design, simplicity and creativity and he needed to plug his gaps with outstanding talent.
If you never fail, you may never achieve holistic, deep personal growth.
Whether managing organisational change, developing a new business model, or extending a user experience within a service offering, we often speak about developing a “Proof of Concept” or POC, where we look to validate if our thinking is correct (or not) through some form of real-world testing.
LEADERSHIP
DEVELOPING
TOMORROW'S
LEADERS
LESSONS FROM A
GLOBAL NOMAD
BY CURTIS SCHMIDT
30 | BIZPRENEUR MIDDLE EAST May 2021