Read time: 3.45 mins
Leadership for the Future: The Ambidextrous Leader
Within business, we’re trying to achieve more things than ever before. We can’t just deliver value today; we also need to prepare to capture the value of tomorrow. That calls for an ambidextrous leader: someone who is equipped to drive strategic change and facilitate growth in tough market conditions.
Transcript
There is a sense that things are changing in the workplace and it’s axiomatic to say that, you know, change is a constant, and that, for sure, is true. But I think one of the areas where we feel there is the greatest change is the sense that what it is that employees value is changing. In a quite lazy way, we often ascribe this to a generational shift, or change in what employees want. We talk an awful lot about millennials, increasingly xennials. We talk about these different generations and what they want, but actually it’s far more nuanced than that. I think there is a sense of new things emerging as being a priority to talent, to people that we want to attract into our organisations.
But there are also some things which have always been important and will always continue to be important. The implication being that, for employers, actually the challenge of engaging the best people has never been greater. Simply, we want more things than we’ve ever wanted before. And we see that in a variety of interesting respects.
Increasingly, we talk about this idea of ambidextrous leadership and a really key word there to tackle, first of all, is this idea of leadership. And we’re not talking about ambidextrous management. We’re talking about ambidextrous leadership, and we say there is a difference between leadership and management – essentially along the lines of the following: managers execute, they’re responsible for implementation. They are responsible for tactical, day-to-day operationalisation of strategy and implementation for effectively delivering results. Leaders don’t simply execute – that’s not their priority. Their priority traditionally is to actually evaluate the current state and to wish to move towards some better, improved future state and to manage the process of change.
One of the big changes in organisations is that’s no longer a senior role; that’s actually now increasingly an ‘everybody’ role, in some form or another. And the link with ambidexterity is really around this idea that ambidexterity is an attempt or an effort to capture the capability, to be able to, on the one hand, deliver today’s results. On the other hand, at the same time, to explore opportunities for the future, to build in the capability to innovate, so that we aren’t just delivering today, but we’re also starting to prepare to capture the value for tomorrow, and to build that in as a continuous process. And the idea that that ambidextrous leader can be simply one person, increasingly, is just simply not true – because no individual, no matter how heroic, can have the cognitive bandwidth to manage that process of understanding the complexity and wanting to encourage change. So, increasingly, we are asking all of our people – to some degree or another – to become both good at delivering results, but good at leading change, and to be able to switch between those roles almost instantaneously.
So for me, it’s a really exciting mix. Theoretically, because it means that this traditional distinction between management and leadership has become blurred, but also this traditional distinction between execution and change has become blurred. And what we have in the centre is this notion of ambidextrous leadership – doing well today, but also preparing to do well tomorrow.