What Will Be Your Leadership Quotient In 2020?
By: Aroon Kumar
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Innovation, Strategy, Automation, Leadership

Functioning as a leader at a time of huge technological innovation comes with a responsibility to act. The more mature technologies and technical architecture become, the more uses and habits are established by default, and the harder it is to bring systems into the kind of equilibrium that truly serves the widest possible cross-section societies, nations and industries. The lightning speed of technology invading our lives mean we can’t afford to delay in adoptions. We must work hard together to establish norms, standards, regulations and sustainable business practices that will serve all humanity in a future filled with the mature capabilities of AI, genetic engineering and automation engines and a virtual world where every bit as difficult to master as the real one. Of The ever-emerging risks and pressures facing economies and societies which are referenced every day in the media like rising inequalities, increasing political polarization, falling trust levels and alarming environmental fragilities provide both impetus for and barriers to the kind of multi stakeholder collaboration and leadership required to make these decisions. These range of challenges cannot be met by any one organization, sector nation or even continent alone. This will require a collective leadership which is collaborative and inspired, to address the systemic changes and to succeed in delivering a better future for the planet and its societies. And this demands for a new type of leadership that emerges from the system — ‘agile leadership’.

Agile Leadership is about cultivating a shared vision for change, working together with all stakeholders of global society and acting on it to change how the system delivers its benefits and to whom.

Agile leadership is neither a call for top down control, nor for subtle influence by powerful groups, but rather a paradigm that empowers all citizens and organizations to innovate, invest and deliver value in a context of mutual accountability and collaboration. On the hind sight, it’s a set of interconnected activities that have the goal of shifting the structures of our social and economic ecosystems to succeed in emerging areas where we failed earlier to deliver sustainable benefits to all citizens, including the future generation.

Agile Leadership requires action from all stakeholders including individuals, businesses, executives, regulators, social influences and policy makers. We can categorize agile leadership into three focus areas such as — technology driven leadership, governance driven leadership and values driven leadership. Let us discuss these three in details.

Technology Driven Leadership:

World’s most innovative companies, governments and civil society organizations are combining new technologies in new products, services and processes that are reshaping existing ways to delivering value to the stakeholders. Being a technology leader or a fast follower in any sector requires making decisions about the proportion of capital allocated to technology investments, navigating the choices of technology pathways and platforms and adapting organizational structures, skills need and relationships across the value chain; emphasizing on adopting and leveraging new technologies to create value in the form of higher quality and lower cost goods and services. All the Industry 4.0 technologies rely and build on digital systems, ensuring that as much as possible organizations are investing in digital communication and collaboration tools, data management and cyber security. The apt analogy is -Data is the new oil, which is a significant and often untapped asset. For leaders it requires significant investment in both strategic decision making and technical infrastructure that can help categorize, store, distribute and analyze diverse and overwhelmingly large flows of data.

Being a technology driven leader means adopting collaborative innovation strategies; the process of learning, refining, and specializing within the organization means in-house experiment models and working with a range from young, dynamic and entrepreneurial firms, academic institutions or organizations from entirely different sectors that offer radically different perspectives, approaches or market access. Making the most of the new technologies requires new skills and mindsets from executives to employees. As per World Economic Forum’s recent study 40% of skills will change across industries as new technologies, business models and markets develop.

Governance Driven Leadership:

Governance is not just government, the formal structure for creating laws and regulations. Governance is inclusive of the development and use of standards, the emergence of social norms that can constrain or endorse use, private incentive schemes, certification and oversight by professional bodies, industry agreements and the policies that organizations apply voluntarily or by contract in their relationships with competitors, suppliers, partners and customers. The significant characteristics of 21st century is that the pace of change is increasing at an uncomfortable rate for many national institutions. The increasing pace of technological change has been especially challenging for policy makers and governments. The ongoing and potential disruptions in the recent times require leadership on governance from different perspectives.

Leaders must rethink — what we govern and why. Debates around technology governance earlier have tended to focus on the role of the public sector in ensuring that innovations are safe for human health or the environment. This still remains critical priority for the technology of recent times, but emerging technologies raise new sets of concerns from labour market impacts to protecting human rights. This raises questions like:

- How can emerging and developing economies employ new technologies and systems to rapidly advance their human and economic development and reduce inequality across countries?

- What new policies, approaches and social protection systems are required to manage the disruptions to labor markets due to the recent technology advancements?

- How skills development, employment models and technological systems be designed to ensure that human labor and creativity are augmented rather than replaced?

- What norms, standards and regulations might be required to ensure that democratic participation and citizen agency are persevered in light of the predictive and influencing power of emerging technologies?

- How do the dynamics and disruptions of the digital impact different genders, cultures and communities with less voice and what new roles and opportunities might be requires?

Standards at the industry and cross-industry levels are particularly powerful governance mechanisms which have been essential in the past. Communities of professionals are essential for establishing the right standards, especially standards that reflect a consensus of values and stakeholder priorities. Developing standards is an essential part of technology governance but the scope, impact and speed of change requires even more that current approaches to developing technical standards or government regulations. Governance driven leadership means exploring new, more agile, adaptive and anticipatory governance approaches.

Value Driven Leadership:

To generate the momentum and illuminate the importance of working together, new age leaders also need to address the technology challenges from a value-based perspective. Societal values provide the motivation and sustaining power to work with technologies and to optimize the benefits rather than maximize the return for singular stakeholders. The debate on values can be complicated but he existence of different perspectives, incentives and cultural contexts does not mean a lack of common ground. No matter the agendas, the importance of persevering the planet for future generations, the value of human life, the global principles of human rights and a sincere concern for global common issues can serve as starting points for recognizing that the true ends of technological development are ultimately and always the planet and its people. Leaders have to create and foster values that need to be human centered.

Being human centered requires protecting and enhancing the rights of citizens within and across counties. While digital technologies and increasingly determining our behavior and fragmenting our experience, driving a human-centered agenda means enhancing the ability of individuals to construct meaning in their lives on a daily basis. To be human centered, emerging technologies must actively contribute to more harmonious and meaningful interaction among individuals. Value driven leadership is active, rather than reactive. Values should be cultivated as a positive feature of technological systems, as opposed to being considered a bug or a mere afterthought. Formulating a values-based approach to technology means recognizing the political nature of technologies, putting societal values forward as priorities and thinking deeply about how an organization contributes to the values that become part of the technologies we produce and use to mediate social and economic exchange. It requires consideration of how our own values and perspectives as individuals are shaped and affected by technologies as we make important technology related decisions.

In the recent times, leaders have the greatest opportunity to change how businesses and communities engage with technologies. The ability to step back from the economic pressures that incentivize a great deal of technological development and consider the systemic impact of technologies and what kind of future they invite for, matters in the long run. The start-up culture and larger corporate culture look to their leaders for how to act when it comes difficult decisions, especially values driven decisions. Strong commitment to societal values can ripple through an organization, provide purpose for employees who want to contribute positively to society through their work and have an impact on the reputation of the organization, both from within and without.

What will drive your Leadership Quotient?

Aroon Kumar is an award winning global marketer and digital business builder.

(This article was first published in ET CIO — https://cio.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/strategy-and-management/whats-your-leadership-quotient/69924693)