As culture changes, people change. Leaders are needed, but it seems that leadership is currently in short supply.
Priorities, desires, methods and knowledge all shift, and the result is that what might have worked yesterday not only doesn’t work today, what might have been praised yesterday might be unacceptable today.
People leading in inter-cultural organizations have the added wrinkle that they may not know how much of their leadership challenges are originating from intra- vs inter-cultural challenges. The potential for miscommunication is increased when you throw multiple variables into the mix.
A trend noted in Tim Elmore’s The Eight Paradoxes of Leadership is that more and more CEOs are simple quitting. They have surveyed the landscape, checked their bank accounts, and have decided to get out while they’re ahead. I imagine that a lot of them don’t really want to fight through the complexity of the current social environment, or quite possibly, they don’t have the tools needed to succeed in leading in this environment.
Consider the following:
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Pandemic – Results in increased isolation, which in turns results in increases in stress when interacting with other people. Depression and other mental health issues have spiked in the last two years.
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Worker Mobility – People are quitting their jobs in droves. They have transferrable skills, education and upward mobility and they have a low tolerance for enduring difficult situations.
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Financial Tail/Headwinds – Government financial policies have made borrowing money incredibly cheap for a season, infused incredible amounts of cash into the economy and borrowed with reckless abandon. Now as inflation increases, those tailwinds which have resulted in incredible financial returns will now turn into headwinds as organizations and employees struggle to overcome inflation in the years to come.
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Generational Expectations – Consider this:
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Baby Boomers (1964 and earlier) –
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Generation X (1965-1980)
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Generation Y / aka Millennials (1981-1996)
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Generation Z (1997 to 2004)
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They are quite potentially all in the same office. Working together. With wildly different experiences. With different values. Different views of the work / life balance. Different antithesis for how they should live. Differing non-negotiables. Even differing views of truth, its nature and whether or not it exists. The Baby Boomer in the corner office isn’t that interested in the Gen-Z intern’s fractured social identity, nor do they care about the millennials self-realization. They just want to run a business, but that simple options may not be in the cards anymore.
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Increasing Expectations – As people look to work more and more as a place to help them self-actualize, and as a place that needs to meet not only finacial but social and emotional needs for belonging and purpose, the pressure begins to build, and the expectations placed on the leader of that organization also increase.
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Increased Transparency – This can be good. As bad behavior by leaders has come under public scrutiny, the result is that public pressure can be brought to bear on these individuals. Some leaders have abused their positions of authority, and now have to pay the price for their indiscretions. Skeletons don’t stay in closets the way they used to.
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Unclear Expectations – One challenge is that as knowledge becomes more readily available, and less trusted, leaders know less and less what is expected of them. And the result is often that they refuse to get into a situation where they are at a positional disadvantage (aka informational asymmetry). Part of this challenge probably stems from leaders who are used to succeed (otherwise they wouldn’t be in this position) and they don’t want to risk tarnishing their own reputation by failing at something they never agreed to in the first place.
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Paradoxical, or Conflicting Demands – This is another post all of its own, but increasingly the demands placed on leaders are become more paradoxical as society has an increasing expectations on leaders while simultaneously becoming more cynical and distrustful of leaders. Integrity is in short supply as leader’s dirty laundry is broadcast across the internet, while simultaneously the leaders spin and discredit any condemning evidence.
The result is that either we are in a leadership crisis, and real leaders are lacking, or maybe we really have an integrity crisis, and the vacuum of leadership is just a symptom, not the cause.