A Service-Leadership Approach

A growth mindset is a belief that anyone can change their talents, abilities, and intelligence. Those with a growth mindset:

• take on challenges
• take advantage of feedback
• use the most effective problem-solving strategies
• provide developmental feedback
• is persistent in accomplishing goals

Conversely, those with a fixed mindset believe that talents, abilities and intelligence can't be improved.

Leaders with a learning mindset are motivated to increase their competence and master something new.

A performance mindset desires to gain favorable judgments about competence and avoid negative judgements.

• Vision: Creating a shared vision is the leadership part of servant leadership;
• Implementation: Helping people implement that vision is the servant part of servant leadership.

Agile leaders are servant leaders.

It's a servant leadership model taught by The Ken Blanchard Companies, based on the belief that leadership style should be tailored to the situation. 

This kind of flexibility is a key principle of agile organizations.

• Work together, complement each other, and function as a team.
• Able to operate on and enable environments that are more dynamic, team-centric, and connected.
• Lead and build teams and partner with the broader ecosystems, keep people connected and engaged, and drive a culture of innovation, learning, and continuous improvement.
• Lead a workforce that includes contractors, the contingent workforce, and crowd talent.
• Understand how different business functions, industries, and technologies come together to form solutions.
• Comfortable and competent with risk-taking.

Millennials expect to be developed via opportunities, mentoring, and stretch assignments. However that is hard to come by in top-heavy companies. 

Most millennials think their roles provide little development while most companies report they have excellent or adequate programs for Millennials.

Organizations don’t change. People change. Many companies move to change systems and structures and create new policies and processes but fail to address the underlying mind-sets and capabilities of the people who will execute it.

A new strategy will fall short of its potential if they fail to address the mental attitude because people on the ground tend to continue to behave as they did before.

Companies that only look outward in the process of organizational change, and dismiss individual learning and adaptation make two common mistakes:

• They focus solely on business outcomes and fail to appreciate that people will have to adapt to implement it.
• They focus too much on developing skills. 

• Engage and empower the entire team. Everyone in your organization should feel empowered to unleash his or her entrepreneurial spirit.
• Suspend judgment. Identify “the good” in the ideas instead.
• “Fail big, but fail soon.” Team members must also know that they have permission to fail.  Sometimes you must move quickly and you can’t always play it safe.
• Set a good example. Take time to connect, mentor and develop your team members. Inspire them to create, look for new approaches and think outside the box.
• Pay attention to the details. Designate specific goals, projects, times and expectations. These types of details ensure the innovation process doesn’t turn into a time suck.
• Don’t forget about the physical environment. The physical environment people are in can influence how they feel, think and interact and can impact the quality and quantity in the innovation process.

The best leaders with the most impact almost always use six classic fundamental practices:

• Uniting people around an exciting, aspirational vision;
• Building a strategy for achieving the vision by making choices about what to do and what not to do;
• Drawing and developing the best possible talent to implement the strategy;
• Relentlessly focusing on results in the context of the strategy;
• Creating ongoing innovation that will help reinvent the vision and strategy;
• Growing yourself so that you can most effectively lead others.

Companies with increased growth are 72% more likely to have high diversity in their organization.

Use Learning & Development (L&D) training to raise awareness about the current state of diversity and inclusion in your work environment.

Up to 70% of trainees forget what they learn within 24 hours after training. However, it does not have to be the case for your employees.

An effective leader will implement and integrate an agile training infrastructure into their daily operations that can change quickly to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Belinda Parmar, Chief Executive Officer of The Empathy Business, believes companies will seek leaders who are able to help them rebuild the empathy we’ve lost with technical, linguistic and mathematical skills, and can understand the information that will continue to emerge. This will require a new kind of “data literacy”, which will be in short supply, and therefore one of the most important skills of tomorrow.

Vikas Pota, Chief Executive of Varkey Foundation, believes the jobs that won’t be automated will be those that require abilities like empathy (persuading and working well with others), a positive attitude (relearning and restudying) and resilience. These “soft” skills are hard to teach, thus there will be demand great teachers.

Also, automation will cause the skills needed by the economy to change which makes it impossible to predict which “hard skills” will be necessary.