Forecasting Report—Leadership Trends for Q4 2021 and 2022, Part I

Dr. Robyn McKay: Good morning everybody. Dr. Robyn McKay here and welcome to Mindset Rx. This is your place to be if you are an emotionally intelligent leader and you're ready to set the tone for a positive, productive and purposeful week and year and life. I am your host, and I'm glad to be here with you today, and today is a really special episode, in fact, this is part one of several that I'm going to be sharing with you some of my predictions or forecasting for the future of leadership and I'm not saying that I have a crystal ball here in my midst. But I will say that I am a visionary leader and I can see around corners and look at what are the patterns, what are the trends that I've been seeing in my work, and I wanted to share some of those things with you today, so as we do every week I wanna first greet everybody and say, hello, I'm so happy that you're here, whether you're watching live or you're listening to the recording or you're listening to the podcast version of this. Welcome I'm so grateful that you're spending some time with me today and re-setting yourself to make the most of your day, your week, and actually the rest of this year, if you can believe it, it's so hard to believe that we are already in October.

First things first, let's go ahead and put away everything that might be distracting you from this time that you have set aside for yourself, and go ahead and take a deep breath in and let it go and take another big deep breath in, and let that one go too. The whole point of mindfully breathing is just knowing when you're breathing in and knowing when you're breathing out. You've heard me say this, if you've been listening for a while now, that the present moment is where all of your information lies, it's where all of your intelligence, your creativity or intuition right here in the present moment. And we spent a whole lot of time thinking about the future and worrying about the past, so today, for right now, let's just practice being in the present moment and allowing yourself the gift of this time that we're gonna spend together. If you're here with me live, I'd love to hear from you. Say hello in the comments, and if you're watching the LinkedIn live broadcast recording, go ahead and say something about that in the comments as well, and I'll check back and say hi to you too.

Alright, so let's go ahead and get started today. As I said, this is the first of several, I'm not sure how many of these forecasting episodes I'm going to do, but for the next couple of times that we meet, you're gonna be hearing some of my predictions for not just the end of this year, but on into 2022, 2023 and beyond. So the first one is this, there's gonna be a shift in the corporate space from a perspective of servant leadership to a perspective of Coach leadership, and I wrote about this recently on LinkedIn, and I'm going to have my assistant put that link in the show notes, so that you can have a look at that too. But I've always hated this phrase, servant leadership.

Good morning, Debbie. I like to say hello to my live watchers, my live viewers, so I wanted to say hi to you. And so we're talking about servant leadership and why I've hated that term so much for so long. And the problem is, I think that there are some people servant leadership is good for. I don't think that the vast majority of women leaders in particular, people of color, in particular, have a lot to benefit from using that term, and here's why, from the time we're young we're socialized to be helpful, to be of service to other people, to not rock the boat, to not make waves, to be a super hard worker and to bring our value that way. But the problem is, especially the further you go on your leadership space, the more difficult it is to do all of that heavy lifting of being of service. In fact, a lot of times I find that the leaders who are identifying as servant leaders are burned out because they find themselves thinking that they have to do stuff for their individual contributors, they just have to do it themselves. So the shift from servant leadership to coach leadership is pretty simple, frankly, but it is one that takes a little bit of time to lock in in your mindset and how you're approaching leadership, because a coach relationship is very different than a servant relationship, I think you would agree with that.

We're gonna dive into that more deeply in an upcoming episode, but I do wanna put that prediction out there that there's a group of us, especially women leaders who are at higher levels who are really looking at what are the best ways for me to lead and looking at maybe servant leadership isn't for me, and what could I do instead. So I wanna put coach leader in your mind front and center as something that you're gonna want to explore more deeply. Alright? Second one, I'm looking at my notes. Second one, there's a shift from, there's gonna be a shift from grit, tenacity and hard work as being the most highly valued attitudes and practices in corporate, and that shift already started this year and last year, of course, during the pandemic. But the shift is gonna go from that grit, tenacity, hard work into something really cool, and those three things, there's more than this, but these are the three things it's hand out for me, flow. So flow is a consciousness state, it's associated with creativity, it happens when you lose track of time, you become completely absorbed and engaged in the activity and you're constantly being challenged, but your skills, abilities and talents are always rising to meet the challenge.

And so flow happens for thought workers, we'll call us. The thought leaders, the thought workers, those who are actually paid for our brain power. The flow happens when you're strategizing, when you're figuring things out, when you're making sense of things, when you're generating new ideas. And I know that you've all probably experienced flow in that capacity, it also happens for emotionally intelligent people, when we're connecting with other people, when we're actually doing the job that we were hired to do. The problem is, of course, that we get buried under emails and meetings, meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. And when all is said and done, you finally maybe get into flow in the late afternoon or something like that, after you've taken care of all of these other things that should be secondary. Flow should be primary, but we treat flow in our culture a little bit like we treat recess.

So you do all of your hard work first, and then if there's time left, you can go play. But the shift that I'm seeing coming in the coming years is very much around putting primacy on flow. I want you to be in flow as much as possible throughout your day. I want you to be able to be focused. I want you to be able to be creative, to be generating new ideas and new ways of doing your work even more efficiently and even more from a place of innovation. We need flow for that. So flow is one of them. Hope is another. And hope isn't that hope you change you think that somebody talked about a long time ago in a political campaign, instead, hope is creating pathways to the best possible outcome, and then having that personal sense of power or agency to achieve those goals. So hope is a really important concept of really important mindset to cultivate, not just for you as a leader, but also with your people. As a side note, one of a leader's greatest gifts and responsibilities is something that hardly anybody ever talks about, and that's to actually carry the vision.

Carry the vision of your organization. If you can't see what's possible for your organization, for your teams, for your division, then it's gonna be really difficult for the people who are reporting into, who are looking to you for leadership and guidance to see that vision as well, so your job is to carry the vision, to be able to see the vision and have faith in the vision, to have faith in your people. And we can do that by increasing the amount of hope that you have, and faith that you have in the vision in your people, and then letting that then create ripple effects in your organization. Cool. So hope is the other one, and then efficiency is a third one, and not one goes back to flow. Because here's the thing that happened, I'm guessing for a lot of you check in with yourselves on this. A lot of the people who I work with who are high performing leaders were pretty smart little kids. And they would finish their homework first, they would be the first one done with their math tests and all the things. But what happened when you were a kid and you got done first is a lot of times you got more stuff piled on you. You had to do more. "Okay, well you finished those? Well do these." Or you had to go help somebody else, and not that there's a problem with helping anybody else, but it does then stunt your ability to actually learn something new every day.

So rather than having attention drawn to yourself as somebody who finishes first, what a lot of talented leaders will have done as children is created this lag between the time they would do problems, they would just take their time. They would just take their time, they would just act like they were like everybody else, even though that they weren't. So that carries over into leadership, and that is something that is going to be shifting in terms of efficiency, because when you're a fast thinker, when you can figure things out quickly, make sense of things and know what to do about them, you're going to be more efficient than somebody who doesn't have that capacity. And that's okay. We want you to be as efficient as possible so you can go out and live your life. Because that brings me to the third thing that I wanna talk to you just briefly about today is the Great Resignation.

The Great Resignation is already sweeping through corporate. There are people who are looking for new positions, there are leaders who are asking questions like, "What's the point of all of this? Why am I doing this work? Why am I continuing to slog through when what I really wanna be doing is something else?" We're finding out more information about pay differentials between men and women. And that's just gender, not to mention the other dimensions of diversity that are affected. And they're looking for other opportunities to be able to work with organizations and people who are aligned with their values, with their vision, and so the great resignation is gonna continue. But here's the thing I wanna bring forward, and this is really where I come in, is that when executives are really thinking about what's next for their careers, it's really important to understand that you're not meant to walk this part of the journey alone. That if you don't change your relationship with time, with money, with work, you're simply going to recreate the systems and structures and processes and patterns that you created in your last position or in the position that you're in now.

So rather than recreate what's already been done, what you already know isn't working for you anymore. What I'm seeing now and in the future, our leaders working with coaches like me, and they're hiring outside of work, so they're not relying on their organizations to pay for their coaching, but they're actually investing in themselves. And they're putting their money on their futures and saying, "I'm gonna invest in myself to create the best possible future for me." And then they're engaging executive coaches, life coaches, spiritual coaches, with all kinds of different perspectives to be able to find what really lights them up inside and to change course in their fields. Sometimes even change careers, not always, but sometimes. And they're doing that in the service of their desire to not create the thing that burn them out, to not create the thing that got them to where they are, but to create something new and remarkable, that creates legacy for their lives, that leaves the world a better place than where it started when they started their work. Alright?

That is the first round of my predictions today. I know it was a whirlwind, but I wanna thank you so much for being here, if you're watching live, again, if you're watching the recording or if you're on the podcast listening, I'd love to hear from you and I will be back. I think I'm gonna do one a little bit later this week. I'm gonna continue the momentum around this future casting for what I'm seeing happening in leadership, so stay tuned for that. And I'm Dr. Robyn McKay and I will see you next time.