5 Insights Into Leadership Development Future (Part 5)

By Linda Fisher Thornton

This is the 5th post in a series called 5 Insights Into Leadership Development Future.

Here are the 4 previous posts in the series in case you missed them:

Part 2 on Wholeness

Part 3 on Growth and Human Development

Part 4 on Positive Ethical Values and the Search For Meaning

This final post will build on the previous 4 posts in this series and discuss how to prepare leaders for the workplace of the future.

To help leaders adapt to increasing global leadership expectations and catastrophic change, we’ll need to:

RETHINK everything we’re doing to help people succeed in leadership
ZOOM OUT to give them the whole picture, and
REBUILD their leader awareness at a higher level

Author’s Note: I have packed three years of leadership research across disciplines into the guide 7 Lenses to help you navigate the process. Chapters where you’ll find specific topics are noted below.

To respond to increasing ethical expectations and the need for meaning and growth, we’ll need to discuss:

Leadership as Both a Responsibility and an Opportunity (Part I)
Leadership as Relational (Chapter 5)
The Impact of Ethical Values on Creating a Positive Workplace Culture (Chapters 2 and 5)
The Human Impact of Trust (Chapter 5)

To help leaders take their thinking to a higher level, to handle the complexity of their challenges, we’ll need to dig into:

How Thinking Drives Behavior (With or Without a Leader’s Permission) (Chapter 6)
The Broad-Reaching Impact of Leader Choices (Chapter 3)
How Ethical Leaders Must be Personally and Contextually Congruent (Chapter 4)
The Kind of Thinking That Ethical Leaders Choose to Use (Chapter 6)

To help leaders stay motivated while they’re learning, we’ll need to provide:

Insight Into the Long-Term Nature of the Leadership Learning Journey (Chapter 1)
Tangible Benefits (to Leaders and Organizations) of Proactive Ethical Leadership (Chapter 2)
Tools and Strategies for Handling Complexity (Chapter 3)
Our Evolving Understanding of the Purpose of Leadership (Chapter 8)

We are learning our way forward in developing leaders for the workplace of the future while they are learning their way forward through complexity, economic challenges and catastrophic change. We will need to stay ahead of that curve to prepare them.