Heading Up a Successful Company Today is a Lot Different Than it was 50 Years Ago. Iron Fists and Inflexible Company Visions are Things of the Past. What Skills Do You Need To Lead Your Business To Success—Not Just Today, But Also in the Future?

By Carol Tice

As an entrepreneur, leadership is the most important part of your job. But in a constantly changing business climate, you can’t model yourself on leadership archetypes from the past and expect to meet the challenges of today’s workplace. Barking orders at your subordinates a la the domineering 1950s boss won’t get your staff on your side. And the buddy-buddy, hang-loose management style of the 1990s won’t get results fast enough to keep pace with the competition.

So what are the traits the 21st century leader needs to succeed? Some of the factors that make a great leader haven’t really changed. The abilities to innovate, execute and be a strong role model for your staff will always be essential. But in addition to these qualities, a new leadership style is emerging, with skills uniquely tailored for success in today’s environment. One management consultant has dubbed this new leader The Enlightened Warrior.

Today’s successful business leader is decisive, insightful and constantly challenging company conventions to keep ideas flowing, says management consultant Mark Stevens, author of Your Management Sucks. This Enlightened Warrior is the model of the 21st century leader.

Enlightened, Stevens says, means that a modern leader identifies opportunities before the competition, taking in information from all sides to spot possible new directions. The warrior side symbolizes a passion for achieving a goal and a willingness to go on the attack—against the competition, and against weaknesses in yourself and the organization.

“You need to wage constructive war continuously,” Stevens says. “It’s not just firing people who aren’t doing the job, but [also] saying, ‘What are we not doing right?’ and then acting on it. It’s a war on complacency.”

Several new factors in the current business environment demand this kind of creative thinking, leadership experts say. One is the increasingly rapid pace of technological change, which opens up new possibilities for nearly every business. Two big changes are people-focused: the growing diversity of the nation’s work force and the anticipated worker shortages as baby boomers retire.

Coping with these trends will take some stretching for many CEOs. Here’s a digest of the key traits that are crucial in our changing workplace.

�¡ Adaptability: If you could have only one skill in your toolkit, this is the one you need right now, says Marty Linsky, co-founder of consulting firm Cambridge Leadership Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the marketplace changing practically overnight, CEOs need to be ready to learn fast and shift on the fly.

“The whole idea that change is the norm rather than the exception is not a tweak, but a profound change in your job as a CEO,” Linsky says. “Your job now is to help the organization develop the capacity to adapt, rather than stake out a vision and drive toward that.”

The tough part is knowing what should change at a company and what can’t be altered without negative consequences, Linsky says. “Adaptability is a very complicated process,” he adds. “You’re making hard choices, including sometimes giving up values or beliefs, or ways of doing business that may even have been crucial to earlier success.”

Linsky says leaders need to design their whole company for adaptability, not just possess the trait themselves. Build an environment where workers are encouraged to express their points of view and to raise tough issues before they become crises. Have an organization wide emphasis on learning from mistakes.

“I know one global bank where the CEO literally selects the biggest mistake of the year from which they learned something important and sends the person responsible [for the mistake] around the globe to talk about what they learned,” Linsky says. “You don’t see that much.”

Putting flexibility first helps leaders break out of established problem-solving patterns to explore new options, says Rick Lepsinger, co-author of Flexible Leadership: Creating Value by Balancing Multiple Challenges and Choices.

“What’s needed is to really understand the situation and not necessarily do the thing that has worked before, but ask, ‘What’s working here?’” Lepsinger says. “Different situations require different behaviors.”

�¡ Self-awareness: Before leaders can tackle the challenges at their organizations, they have to look in the mirror, says Ken Blanchard, co-author of the management classic The One Minute Manager, and more recently author of Leading at a Higher Level. “The journey of leadership is first taking a look at yourself,” he explains. “Then you’re ready to deal one-on-one, then you can take over a team, and then an organization.”

Alan Gilburg, principal at the Gilburg Leadership Institute in Holyoke, Massachusetts, agrees. Leaders need to look within and root out negative patterns. Gilburg says two types are common today: autocrats who like to make big decisions but don’t take responsibility for fulfilling their goals, and abdicrats who shift key decisions onto others when they should be leading. “It’s not about the tools and techniques,” he says. “It’s about the user of the tools.”

Once you’ve assessed your leadership strengths, you can play to those, work on improving weak areas, or hire people whose strengths will complement your own.

�¡ People skills: Everybody says their employees are their top priority, but management consultants say few companies’ actions show it. Changing work force dynamics make managing people an increasingly crucial skill for leaders, says Trudy Bourgeois, president and CEO of the Center for Workforce Excellence in Lewisville, Texas.

Generation X and Y workers know they’re in demand as the American work force shrinks, Bourgeois says. Leaders need to learn how to keep this new wave of younger workers happy, or risk losing them. Many women leaders have an edge here, because they tend to focus on relationships more than male CEOs.

Among the traits younger workers want from leadership are authenticity, accessibility and respect for their individuality. “They want personal credit for the results they get for the organization,” Bourgeois says. “If a leader says, ‘Under my leadership, we … ,’ [employees will] stand right up and say, ‘You didn’t do crap.’ Leaders need to develop their ability to connect with the most diverse work force in history.”

Aside from adjusting to a new generation’s sassy attitude, one of modern leaders’ prime responsibilities is helping their people adjust to the changes sweeping their workplaces. Whether it’s a change in direction, a merger or a job reassignment, employees are nervous when change comes, says Doug Staneart, president and CEO of The Leaders Institute in Fort Worth, Texas. “The number-one thing I’ve seen that makes great leaders now is they have a need for change,” he points out, “and they allow people in their organization to feel safe about that change.”

Staneart takes clients through a four-step program to teach them how to help workers embrace change. He says first, leaders must establish trust and reduce conflicts by airing them honestly. Only then can a leader start to gain buy-in and cooperation with a planned change. Once the team is onboard, leaders should step up efforts to recognize and reward the potential of their staff.

At clinical-test monitoring company Coast Independent Review Board in Lake Forest, California, CEO Darren McDaniel says he has helped his employees cope with the company’s explosive growth—from annual sales of zero to $7 million in four years—by constantly evaluating and rewarding their performance. He says that annual performance reviews, or even quarterly ones, are not enough input these days, adding, “I have people who’ve been promoted five times and tripled their income in the past 18 months.”

�¡ Decisiveness: The days of holding endless meetings to discuss possibilities are over, says Stevens. At the current rate of change, fast action is what matters. The desire to reach consensus or get buy-in from all parties has to be curtailed at some point, and the leader has to make a decision. 

Women leaders, in particular, often need to work to boost their skills in this area. With her women clients, founder and partner Janeé Harrell of Amplyfi Consulting in Dallas encourages an attitude she calls “Stand and Not Quiver.” “I recommend women get very data-driven and approach men very directly and decisively,” Harrell says. “Base it on facts, and gain the respect you deserve.”

On the plus side, women tend to be confident in relying on their intuition, which can serve them well in cutting to the chase, says Bourgeois. “It’s good to be intuitive, because the world is changing so dramatically that the data isn’t there to support good business decisions all the time,” she explains.

The ideal management style for the 21st century, Bourgeois says, blends typical female and male traits—you’ll need both intuition and a focus on the bottom line, both people skills and analytical strength.

�¡ Collaborative skills: The problems today’s companies face can’t be solved if department leaders stay in their own silos, says Cynthia McCauley, senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. CEOs need to create cultures that foster idea exchanges among all corners of their organizations. McCauley says, “We need more managers who can work across boundaries—with vendors, external partners, across business units.”

Some Things Don’t Change
There are some basic skills leaders have always needed. The only difference is that now these skills are even more crucial. A few key classics:

�¡ Walk the walk. The days when CEOs could give themselves fat bonuses while cutting workers’ pay are over—that maneuver cost American Airlines CEO and chairman Donald Carty his job in 2003, and that’s only one example. If you’re not staying late to make the big project deadline, employees won’t either, says Evan Wittenberg, director of the Wharton Graduate Leadership Program at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The ethical standards you model will be picked up by employees, he notes. “You’ve got to lead the organization in a way you’d want others to emulate when you’re not around.”

�¡ Innovate. Too few leaders are creating organizations designed to encourage innovation, says Lepsinger. If there isn’t a system in place to share new ideas and move those ideas along to become salable products, innovation will be stifled. He says, “You need to get everyone trained to think out of the box and be creative.”

�¡ Execute, execute, execute. One of the biggest leadership gaps these days is between vision and execution, says Lepsinger. Too many leaders spend their days dreaming about the big picture, while research shows that more than half of workers despair of being able to execute the boss’ sweeping vision. “We find that vision doesn’t drive execution of the business results,” he says. “You need to develop an operations strategy and execute that strategy.”

Seattle writer Carol Tice reports on business and finance for The Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine and other leading publications.