Leadership Lessons From Star Trek
By: Ulrike Kroska
Tags: Diversity, Future Of Work, Leadership, Innovation

Leadership Lessons From Star Trek

via cinemablend.com

If I could join my dream team, it would be the crew of the USS Enterprise.

I always wonder, if we can dream up great team dynamics and exceptional leadership, what is holding us back from creating them in real life?

Let’s look at 5 takeaways you can use to elevate your team today.

Share your vision and values consistently

People need direction, especially if you want to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Or, as my friend put it: You should not pack dancing shoes when you want to go hiking.

As it turns out our decision-making is very much influenced not just by our conscious values (think stated company values), but also by our personal values — that we may not even be aware of.

“Most of the time, we take for granted that executives’ values are aligned with their company’s goals. But often, that’s not the case […]. Without that alignment, the executive’s values may drive the company in an undesirable direction with every major decision that is made.”

What made Captain Kirk’s leadership so appealing then is exactly this alignment between the mission and their risk-taking, constructive conflict and continuously pushing boundaries of finding what is not yet known.

Create diversity through curiosity

Being a leader means listening to diverse thoughts and connecting them in innovative ways.

And while gender and racial diversity are mostly top of mind, there are many more dimensions to achieving true inclusion and reflect the colourfulness of our people: from different ethnicity, religion, age, education and culture — bring it all together.

If you don’t know where to start,

create opportunities and remove barriers to interaction between people inside and outside your team

ensure everybody’s input

speak human to human

acknowledge and raise awareness for different cultural perspectives

An honest conversations and curiosity will go a long way in fostering a truly diverse team and enable unconventional solutions.

“The prejudices people feel about each other disappear when they get to know each other.” (Star Trek)

“I can do that!!” (Chekov)

Don’t judge your team by their age and lack of experience. As a leader, you are a promoter of their potential.

And sometimes, excellence comes from unexpected places.

Going into the future we are facing greater uncertainty and increasing technological advances. Mechanical processes can be automated and replaced by robots.

Your future success will depend less on years of experience and a formal education, but rather your ability to identify, analyse and break down problems, and connect individual elements to create entire new solutions.

There is more than one possible future (Spock)

Gone are the days of 5 and 10 year plans that were negotiated in lofty boardrooms once a year.

We need to prepare for jobs that don’t even exist yet, and Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are reshaping our business landscape.

While you still need a clear vision of where you want to go, today’s world needs you to be agile enough to adjust your path towards it. Or, as Filip Moriau at Stragilon Consulting put it: Goals are best achieved when targeted indirectly. If you want to reach point B, aim for point C.

If you’re not sure where to start,

build resilience for you and your team — the ability to maintain agency and a positive outlook will sustain your innovation capability

develop a true growth mindset — believing that you can learn anything will allow you to capitalize on opportunities

build a strong network, inside and out of your work team, to facilitate connectivity and idea development

Emotions are part of leadership, but don’t make decisions when you’re emotionally compromised (Spock)

How I love this statement!

I find it especially relevant today when so many leaders underestimate the feelings of grief and loss that come with the transition that is this global pandemic.

Hal Gregersen and Roger Lehman at MIT point out that we are constantly in a personal or professional transition: We get married, we get promoted (or not), we build a house or move to a new city.

All of those transitions require us to deal with what is ending, and then create perspectives and opportunities in the new beginnings.

How often do we as leaders acknowledge and understand our own emotions, let alone create a space in the workplace where emotions can be dealt with? After all, emotions are a central part of being human. And yet, how often are emotions being portrayed as weakness?

There is great opportunity in pivoting our definition of leadership success from organizational growth to people growth. After all,