With bold, focused leadership, we can pursue business for good, prove our organisations’ worth to consumers, inspire our teams and find creative solutions at unprecedented pace.
For many leaders, the last few years have shown how adaptable and resilient we are – and provided a platform and mandate for change. It’s this new way and better way to lead that will power business and society’s collective revival.
To explore the behaviours driving this new way to lead, we surveyed over 300 business leaders across the US, UK and Europe.
The results confirm what our experts have observed supporting leaders in multi-nationals across the globe – that there are concrete ways of leading that make a tangible difference to the health and happiness of an organisation and wider society. And that leaders who don’t understand and put these behaviours into practice risk being left behind.
Helping people adapt to new and complex situations with innovation and creativity.
Giving people the space and permission to imagine and deliver value-creating responses.
Creating environments where aware, inclusive and responsive teams are able to make a success out of change.
Applying new perspectives and a broader lens to existing technologies and evolving challenges.
The overwhelming majority of leaders recognise these four behaviours as being vital to leadership now and in the future.
They told us that these behaviours aren’t ‘nice to have’, but critical values needed for their organisations to thrive. And that now is the time to act.
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69% of leaders say they urgently need to change their leadership approach post-COVID
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79% say employees, customers and investors expect them to demonstrate behaviours that drive wider social value
We see disruption every day in our work with innovative start-ups, scale-ups, and in reinventing old-world organisations for the digital age.
Across our work, we typically encounter four forces of opportunity. These forces are impacting everyone: customers, consumers, citizens and patients. And this means they’re impacting organisations and those who lead them.
The right leadership approach can transform these seemingly disruptive forces into competitive advantage. Our respondents told us the behaviours above will be key to responding to these trends and turning them into opportunities.
We asked respondents to identify as either ‘survivors’ – those focused on cost reduction and sustaining the pace of change – or ‘revivers’ – those focused on continued acceleration, transformation and investment in growth and innovation.
Revivers were likelier than survivors to recognise the importance of all four behaviours, and are:
We’ve identified five steps that can transform leadership behaviour – across your top team and throughout your organisation.
To find out more, get in touch with one of our experts