In ManpowerGroup's 2024 Age of Adaptability trends report, we discussed how the pandemic forced an immediate overhaul of management as we knew it. While societal disruption, advancing technology, and sustainability reshaped work, leaders needed to steer organizational change without tangible models from which to draw. They also needed to promote upskilling and reskilling, inclusion, and satisfaction among their employees while managing a geographically dispersed and distributed workforce.
Leaders who had done things more or less the same way for two centuries were suddenly operating in the dark. It takes a special kind of person to do this effectively, and this person is what we will refer to as the 2030 Leader.
The 2030 Leader
In 2030, the majority of leaders will be members of the millennial generation, or those born between 1980-95. In the early aughts while entry-level workers, the millennials made their mark early with their insistence on a more empowered, enlightened business world. As an ethnically diverse generation raised on computers, the millennials have adapted seamlessly to the integration of smart machines into the workplace and more naturally engage with diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) issues.
In general, these circumstances make millennials the ideal candidates to shepherd our organizations into the second half of the 21st century. But of course, everyone is different and some leaders will be more competent in 2030 than others.
I believe that the future of leadership will be co-created by young trailblazers with several core traits including flexibility, humility, emotional intelligence, global perspective, and technological curiosity. Let’s describe these one by one.
Flexibility: The years 2022 and 2030 were characterized by what many termed the “RTO wars.” Entrenched baby boomer leaders wanted the workplace to return to post-pandemic norms, while many employees weren’t having it. Although a majority of organizations settled on a compromise of 2-3 days in the office per week, the RTO wars still exist.
But by 2030, millennial leaders are likely to have put an end to them. Rather, they will be more inclined to accept a reality that includes a variety of employment arrangements that are to some degree customized to each employee. These leaders will be comfortable with the constant change inherent in a rapidly evolving world and are likely to staff accordingly – creating project-based, time-bound teams from a variety of internal and external sources (retired part-timers, fractional executives, subject matter experts, etc.) as business needs require.
As time goes on, leaders will become more proficient in best practices for managing distributed and remote workforces. And millennials will be the first generation of leaders to successfully model effective work/life integration, with a holistic orientation toward work, family, and leisure.
Humility: Back in the 1970s, a management researcher named Robert Greenleaf proposed the notion of servant leadership, a style in which leaders display personal accountability and put the needs, aspirations, and interests of their followers above their own. Never has the concept of servant leadership been more relevant, as ManpowerGroup Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues that the challenges of this century mandate that leaders are selected on competence rather than confidence, humility rather than charisma, and integrity rather than narcissism.
In 2030, organizations will still be in the position of needing to pivot quickly if an established strategy isn’t working, which means that leaders will need to adopt an agile mindset, admit when they’re wrong, and solicit advice from a much wider range of stakeholders – including individual contributors deriving insights from AI-based tools – than they have in the past.
For the rest of this article, visit ManpowerGroup's Global Insights blog.
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