Leadership Paradigm for the FUTURE.

Ania Lichota

Executive Coach, Inspirational Speaker, Author. Philanthropist. Extreme Adventurer.

We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. The BIG Data is doubling every six months and disruptive technologies are introduced daily. The workforce and client pools are changing with the generation Y, Millennials and increased mobility. The business and product life cycles have been significantly reduced. The values are shifting in the corporate world with one in four youth enterprises having a social angle, with more women at all business levels than a decade ago and social responsibility attached to most mission statements.

To lead and achieve business success in the new world of driverless cars, drones delivering packages, 3D printers producing things and university curricula available on line for free, we need an altered approach. The old leadership paradigm will not stick.

We need leaders who are skillful in allowing insights, who can feel the future, who are able to build deep and meaningful relationships in every corporate direction. Leaders, who are humble, disciplined and personally mature – comfortable with giving trust and with ‘not knowing’. There is a need to develop leaders who can take themselves out of the picture and allow the natural talents of their teams to come through.

Maturing for a leader starts with developing awareness - awareness of the self and seeing the Meta level of how your team ‘is’ and ‘is not’ and how it functions. That extends to the stakeholders, clients, suppliers and the market. With the knowledge of yourself and of the part, you played in becoming who you are as well as what you bring to the table as a person you can start taking full responsibility for yourself in the office. You might be asking yourself – what does she mean by that? I mean taking responsibility for your intentions through your thoughts, words, actions, habits to your character and the future you create for yourself, your team and your company.

When you can identify how you ‘show up’ in your role, you want to work on emotional intelligence, recognition and self-regulation of mental and behavioral patterns and owning yourself fully. You will become the ‘cause in the matter’ in every corporate and life situation – whatever the outcome. Your language will shift from the outside in. You will make all results yours only from accountability perspective.

The moment you can see your team through a camera of a contributor with emotional distance you start acting from a different place inside you. You not only are taking part in meetings but you become acutely aware of how every word, gesture and interaction lands and what it does to the motivation, atmosphere and the environment you – the leader - shape.

With time you can see that making a mistake is positive, experimenting and course correcting is part of a response to the emergent future that will always be unknown and you cannot fully prepare for it. You start developing intuition - the nudge inside you that knows what your rational brain does not. You become an expert in unleashing and nurturing real creativity where there is no judgment and no fixed rules to go by.

Not taking yourself too seriously and connecting to yourself on a new level allows your presence to grow and deepen. When you speak or present and 80% of your attention is on you, you are listened to, all of your words have purpose. Being conscious of your subtle projections you start moderating conversations to a new richness of experience for the people that work and transact with you. That creates followership and charisma forms.

Reframing becomes a natural aptitude to see an advantage in a disadvantage. With the right mindset and attitude you reexamine FEAR into an emotional state you control, live with and thrive on as a leader.

Developing competence in being mindful allows you not only to be with the reality as it is but also to sharpen your senses to be fully available. It expands your palette of possible responses to what is happening in business, between you and other people and you become able to call on emotional resilience, courage, positivity and other useful states that your body knows from the past but they are buried into the subconscious and rarely used as a resources for business success.

Allowing your team to fully develop their natural potential requires egolessness. When you can differentiate the protective ego – the personality – from the core of your being you free yourself up to fully lead without limits with self-trust, vulnerability and alertness. As you project your full maturity people around you ‘get infected’ and become autonomous, self-reliant and also dependent on the grater whole of which they are a part. Your organisation becomes self-organising and self-regulating in a constant, intimate dance with the market.

Constributor: Ania left Poland in ‘96 with one bag on a bus to study at London School of Economics. Since then she’s visited 67 countries, lived in 9, worked in 17 at Senior Executive levels in financial services. Ania has built, grown, restructured, liquidated and integrated businesses in 4 languages. She has double MSc, MBA and PhD in International Leadership.

For further information about Ania click here