3 Leadership Mindsets for the Future of Work
Hear from leadership expert Margie Warrell on how to develop the three mindsets to help drive the future of work in your organization.
Key takeaways
- Why leaders should set the tone of your organization
- Why curiosity needs to be encouraged
- How personal purpose can help you embrace change
Your leadership mindsets are a powerful tool, especially for shaping the future of work. The mindsets you practice today will cascade across the people you lead, setting them up to conquer what’s to come.
But which mindsets can best prepare us for the unknown future, and how can you actively cultivate them?
“The right leadership mindsets are what makes it possible to simultaneously run and change a business,” says Korn Ferry Senior Partner Margie Warrell, a global authority on leadership. “When others feel lost, leaders with these mindsets are prepared to embrace ambiguity and confidently lead their teams.”
Below, Margie shares the three leadership mindsets essential for the future of work and speaks on how you can cultivate them.
Mindset 1: Setting the tone
As a leader, you set the tone for your team. Are you intentionally being proactive and setting a positive tone, or are you reacting to how others behave and amplifying negative emotions? Put another way, leaders must be the thermostat, not the thermometer. A thermostat sets the temperature; a thermometer just reads it. Which are you?
Emotions drive behavior and they’re contagious. As much as we’d like to believe logic and rational thinking drive behavior, the truth is people react to the emotional tone of their environment. Consider the current business climate, which is characterized by rapid change and disruption. On one hand, there’s a sense of anxiety and foreboding. But on another, there’s incredible opportunity.
Leaders who act as a thermometer “read” that anxiety and foreboding and may amplify it. Leaders who act as the thermostat are tapped into the emotional landscape of their organization, but aren’t held hostage by it. They’re proactively setting a bold vision and galvanizing teams around a shared purpose. They foster an environment of positivity, excitement and potential.
Hear Margie speak on how leaders can inspire change by harnessing the power of their emotions and mastering the art of communication, empathy and perspective.
Mindset 2: Embracing learning
When the pace of change outside of an organization exceeds the pace of change within, that organization is not going to be able to maintain a competitive edge. Scaling continuous learning across different functions is what brings back this edge; and leaders need to role model a learning mindset.
It’s about becoming an organization of learn-it-alls, not know-it-alls; individuals need to be excited to uncover new ways of doing things. Critically, they prioritize curiosity over cleverness. This means rather than trying to solve everything themselves based on existing knowledge, they remain open to new possibilities, inviting others to the table with them.
Agile individuals create an agile enterprise. Our research finds that companies with highly agile executives have a 25% higher profit margin than their peers. Individuals with high learning agility are promoted twice as fast as their peers. When leaders embrace learning agility, they set the stage for all people in the organization to embrace it, unleashing their true potential.
Hear Margie speak on how leaders can gain a competitive edge by championing a learning mindset, humility and curiosity, to pave the way for faster innovation across organizations.
