10 Global Leadership Trends in Business for 2022

Leaders in business face constant challenges. While some of these challenges are typically easier to identify and respond to, others, such as recognizing and developing emerging leaders within your organization, can prove to be more difficult. Today, C-level executives need to be deliberate about their people strategies as well as prioritize the development of next-generation leaders in order to retain their talent and maintain a competitive advantage. One of the ways to do this is by having a flexible work environment.¹

If you want the talent in your company to thrive, you need to promote professional development and ensure your leaders feel connected, engaged, and recognized for what they contribute to your organization. According to a recent Gartner study, work flexibility plays a huge part in whether a company can retain talent: 39 percent of employees say they would leave their organization if they had to return on-site completely, while 55 percent want a flexible working policy. The study also found that employees are three times more likely to perform at a higher level if they’re given flexibility of how, when, and where they work.²

The role of leadership in business is more than just strategizing a winning business model to drive the bottom line: it also includes developing employees to ensure that the future set of managers are well-balanced, inclusive, and set new trends for leadership. This is positive for the long-term growth of the business and for the industry overall.

Here are the leadership and development trends to watch in 2022 to ensure that businesses and employees thrive in the current and predicted future state of the market:

1. Investing in diversity and inclusion

The importance of embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) and prioritizing it at the leadership level will help unleash the potential of your employees, helping to create a better and more engaged workforce. It also helps to increase the company’s earnings.

A 2020 report³ by McKinsey & Company explores the relationships between diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how by increasing DE&I, progress is driven.

“Our latest report shows not only that the business case remains robust, but also that the relationship between diversity on executive teams and the likelihood of financial outperformance has strengthened over time,” McKinsey writers explain.

They found that with greater representation, there was greater performance.

As leadership increases its focus on diversity, there are benefits to retention, recruiting, profits, and particularly performance.

Academic Director in the Diversity and Inclusive Leadership online short course from EGADE Business School at Tecnológico de Monterrey Dr. Mike Szymanski explains the need for DE&I in business:

2. Fostering emotionally agile leadership

The frequency of burnout in a business is based on factors that rise and fall on leadership, such as constantly changing or unclear instructions, an unrealistic workload, and low emotional reserves.⁴ Burnout has been even more abundantly clear since the COVID-19 pandemic, with an increase of engagement to 40 percent for those working in an office and 41 percent for those working remotely before abruptly crashing. Employee well-being and engagement seem to be connected and correlated with causation: engagement decreases burnout, with an increase in productivity and well-being, but when engagement and well-being decrease, burnout increases.⁵

Empathy and emotionally agile leadership – whether it’s realizing that instructions aren’t clear and clarifying them, keeping in touch with both remote and in-person workers to ensure that the workload is realistic and not overburdening, or checking in on the emotions of employees and making sure that their mental health isn’t suffering – is how great leaders can prevent burnout in their teams.

With this increased emphasis on mental health, employees are taking note. Many are weighing up their personal health needs against their current role requirements, and choosing resignation over allowing their job to interfere with their mental health. As a result, it’s imperative that employers care about, prioritize, and address the mental health needs of their employees.⁶

3. Learning to lead several generations

In today’s professional environment, baby boomers, Generation X, Generation Z, and millennials are all working side by side in a multigenerational workforce that boasts different values and working styles. And as people live longer, they’re working more too: Senior employees can easily be 50 years older than a company’s youngest workers, resulting in the need for leaders who are able to adjust their leadership style according to who they’re managing.

Each generation comes with its own cultural context and economic background, and so requires different management approaches.

As well as leaning on leadership, a multigenerational workforce has the opportunity to learn from one another, fostering a culture of collaboration, teaching, and understanding. Regardless of the leadership approach that is taken, as the current state of the market and the future continue to include a diverse age group, it’s essential to encourage teams to work together and learn from one other’s experiences, which will allow the business to thrive.

4. Launching more female leaders

Fortune’s latest list of Fortune 500 companies showed a record number of female leaders: 41 women are leading companies, holding 8.1 percent of CEO spots. Records are being broken as well. This is the first time that two Black women are CEOs.⁷

“And for the first time, two Black women – Roz Brewer from Walgreens Boots Alliance and Thasunda Brown Duckett from TIAA – are serving as CEOs at the same time. Additionally, Jane Fraser at Citi Group is making history as the first woman to helm a major U.S. bank, and Karen Lynch at CVS Health is making history as head of the highest-ranked Fortune 500 company ever led by a woman. The $268 billion health care company ranks No. 4 on this year’s list,” CNBC reporter Courtney Connley says.⁸

While this shows great improvement, there’s room for more.

“We continue to see steady progress in the Fortune 500, with a handful of women and two [new] women of color being elevated into CEO roles,” says Lorraine Hariton, CEO of the global gender equality firm Catalyst.⁹

An Australian study found nearly a 5 percent increase in market value for companies with at least 10 percent of women on their boards, which turned out to be an average increase of $78.5 million. For companies with more females in key management positions, that percentage increased to 6.6, equating to $104.7 million in market value.¹⁰

Priestley, A. (Jun, 2020). ‘Women bosses bring profits: Company values soar $80 million under female CEOs, world-first study shows’. Retrieved from SmartCompany.

Businesses that develop their female leadership and diversify their teams by creating a corporate culture that makes employees feel included will achieve success.

The Oxford Women’s Leadership Development programme can help you grow as a leaders within your career and organisation.

5. Fighting for authenticity

Gone are the days where rigid hierarchical organizational structures produce results. Authenticity in leadership is key, and leaders who create space for thoughtful, honest conversations about real issues that impact their team will thrive this year.¹¹ More organizations are investing in leadership development skills to teach leaders to function in this way, especially since 80 percent of employees hold the belief that the workplace is improved through authenticity and in leadership.¹²

Authenticity improves employee productivity, trust between employees and leaders, relationships between coworkers, and the positivity of the work environment. This authenticity starts at the top, with leadership that communicates effectively and provides feedback.¹³

6. Focusing on accountability

Remote teams are functioning worldwide, which is great for lowering office overhead costs and harnessing a wider range of talent and productivity, but it’s challenging when it comes to transparency and accountability within a team.¹⁴

The benefits of employee accountability are many:¹⁵

• It’s the quickest route to growing employee engagement, which means they feel connected to key results and believe that what they do matters
• It gives employees more meaning in their work
• It breeds self-reliance and confidence in a team
• Employees are able to focus on what matters, instead of finger-pointing and blame-shifting
• Accountability reinforces employees’ value to the company and sets them up for success, which has a positive effect on you as the leaders, and for the organization

A culture of accountability revolves around leadership. As such, businesses are investing in training their leaders about creating consequential conversations, both up and down the leadership ladder. Managers who lead by example by holding themselves, and those in their team, accountable to an attainable list of standards and values will set the bar for others to follow.

7. Staying responsive and adaptable

If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it’s that we need to stay responsive and adaptable. You never know now when you suddenly won’t be able to go into the office. Or, half your team might be sick. In order to remain competitive, leaders should adopt a flexible way of thinking.¹⁶

This way of thinking leverages the unique advantages of your staff. For example, with diverse employees, there are different perspectives that can offer different insights. These insights can help reach the target audience. Every book, magazine, and article your team reads helps shape their thinking. By encouraging employees to continue learning and advancing their skills, the team will be able to adapt to different scenarios. One person might know something someone else doesn’t, and by sharing their knowledge, they can help the team to grow.

Trust and respect are important in order for team members to feel psychologically safe and supported. By building relationships with others and offering a safe place for opinions and risks, employees are able to communicate and build upon ideas, work through hardships, and support one another.

One part of being an adaptable leader is adapting your leadership style to different contexts. Write new content that focuses on how to be adaptable as a leader and how to adapt your leadership style to different contexts.

To change your leadership style based upon the environment or situation:¹⁷

• Recognize that there is a need to change your leadership style
• Take steps to be a purposeful leader
• Create a plan that will help you lead your team through different challenges
• Make sure to communicate clearly with the members of your team as there is change
• Evaluate the goals that are being created to ensure that they’re realistic
• Delegate tasks to members of the team
• Be transparent with the decision-making
• When problems occur, address those problems quickly to create a learning opportunity
• Look back and see what plans need to be adapted
• Provide accountability, to yourself and the team, to help reach goals
• Remain empathetic, leading with empathy to nurture employees

If you’re interested in solving business problems, the Inquiry-Driven Leadership online course from MIT Sloan can help you to develop the inquisitive leadership skills to overcome real business challenges and uncover new opportunities.

8. Cultivating culture

Culture speaks to what you do as a business and how you do it, but also includes the less obvious characteristics of a team, such as the shared mindsets and values that influence how your employees behave.¹⁸ Developing a healthy culture where teams feel safe, comfortable, valued, and supported will result in improved employee engagement, retention, performance, and innovation, as well as overall business profitability.¹⁹ A study of over 1,900 companies and their five million employees found that those organizations with healthy cultures, based on the Organizational Health Index (OHI), achieve more: Within nine months of implementing OHI advice, 40 percent of target goals were achieved for a telecom carrier, while for an automobile manufacturer there was a 13 percent increase in volume.²⁰ Working on company culture has been proven to have a measurable impact.

As more and more people are working remotely, company culture has changed. By establishing core company values and goals, while involving the entire team, culture can be created. Showing appreciation, asking team members what they want and need, offering support, and asking for feedback goes a long way in growing company culture.²¹ As employees either continue to work remotely or begin returning to the office, letting the company mission and vision lead culture is the first step toward ensuring a remote or hybrid culture is able to be maintained.²²

9. Keeping up with technological innovation

The only thing that remains constant in the business world is the need for companies to stay agile and adaptable. A culture of continuous learning should be at the top of management’s agenda to attain and keep a competitive advantage.

As tech continues to influence business, it’s becoming increasingly important that every member of the team becomes more digitally savvy, and leaders who help their employees learn new skills as new technologies emerge will reap the benefits. Investing in training for both leaders and their teams improves engagement and loyalty, and will help businesses stay relevant and up-to-date with the latest technology.²³

We are in the undisputed age of data with an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created daily and likely 175 zettabytes by 2025.²⁴ Data impacts how businesses and people make decisions, so companies are focusing on producing leaders who understand the potential of data to inform strategy. It’s estimated that nine out of every 10 people who are six years old or older will be digitally active by 2030. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are all industry leaders and store more than 1,200 petabytes of information. Businesses will continue to be impacted by these goliaths. Every year, there are 1.2 trillion Google searches. When looking at content on the internet, four fifths of all data is available in just 10 percent of the available languages.²⁵ Businesses are likely to embrace more forms of technology; TikTok alone has nearly 700 million users who are active, it’s been installed more than 2.6 billion times, users span 155 countries, and there are more than 1 billion videos.²⁶

10. Saying farewell well

The cost of staff turnover for an organization can be high, especially when it has invested time and money to train individuals and build effective teams. Employee turnover can cost an average of 33 percent of the worker’s salary. For companies to break even on the expenses of onboarding a new manager, it takes just over six months of the employee staying at the company, if they stay. Nearly a third of employees leave their job within the first six months, with almost 70 percent leaving within three months.²⁷

Most business leaders understand that retaining talent is more cost-effective than hiring new people. The value that a productive employee brings to the business is also significant. A study found that high performers are 400% more productive than average ones.²⁸ “But while top performers are more engaged in their jobs than average performers, they are only slightly less likely to leave in the next six months,” says Shelley Smith, founder and CEO of Premier Rapport.

This said, developing leadership’s approach around existing employees could generate positive returns in the long run.²⁹ Leaders who keep exit interviews positive are finding that these former employees leave the company as brand ambassadors who – if they felt valued while working at an organization and leave on good terms – often make great rehires, as they already know the culture and systems, and can bring more skills and expertise to the company.³⁰

On the whole, leaders who invest in developing their leadership teams this year will see tremendous company-wide benefits, both in their teams’ productivity and in their bottom line. Developing a culture of authenticity, accountability, diversity, empathy, and agility within organizational leadership will foster a company that has engaged, motivated individuals working toward a common goal.

Developing your team can also help you grow as a leader and become a more valuable manager, helping in future endeavors. Interpersonal skills, leadership skills, and people skills all combine to create the best teams, and companies, possible.

Explore online leadership courses to advance your skills in 2022.