Essential Skills for Future-Ready Leaders

Embrace change, adapt, learn, and succeed. It sounds simple enough. Like most things about leadership, it's easier said than done. On a practical level, it starts with developing skills. Essential skills for future-ready leaders include:

●        Vision

●        Collaboration

●        Management of complex and diverse workforces

●        Decision making (when to move forward and when to drawback)

●        Adaptation

●        Integration of new technology

That's a lot of work. On top of that, every industry has unique challenges, which require different skills. Where do you focus? Where do you start?

The Clubs in Your Bag 

Your leadership skills (and even the resources of your organization) are like the clubs in your golf bag. To get ready for the future, whether it's in business or out on the course, you need:

●        A range of options

●        Familiarity with how they work

●        Experience putting them into play

Your Clubs

Your clubs must fit you. If they don't, your game will suffer. In a similar way, your organization must fit your vision and that fit is your culture, which is essentially a set of guidelines you apply to your organization. It improves performance by helping people act in a way that aligns with your vision.

Using the proper club helps your game by helping you maintain the right form. When you watch pro golfers, their clubs act like extensions of their bodies. The perfect fit of their clubs is part of their success – just like a perfect fit between your vision and your culture will be part of your success. Your team members will act as part of your organization.

Your Practice

Even if you can have the best clubs available and the perfect fit — you still need to put in the work. Great leaders spend time building key skills, assessing their weaknesses, and pursuing their visions of success. If you do same, over time — you will improve. It's as simple and as challenging as that.

Your Knowledge

The final step is applying your skill and preparation. The more you know the course ahead, the better decisions you can make. There's no single path to getting all the information you need. You can inform your leadership practice by any or all the following, and more:

●        Build a diverse leadership team to give you multiple angles on your situation

●        Depend on and develop your personal experience

●        Use your emotional intelligence to analyze complex situations

●        Actively listen to what team members, stakeholders, and even outsiders are telling you

Experience and knowledge matter — but they don't have to be your own. In today's workforce, there's always someone around who has some useful insight.

Vision: Developing the Most Important Skill for Future Success

Vision is the ability to recognize what path you're on. It's the ability to see whether that path will take you to where you want to go. Of all the essential leadership skills for the future, vision would be the first one I recommend developing.

Successful leaders dedicate time and effort to refining their visions. Are you ready to see vision as a skill and not a trait?