There was a telling WhatsApp forward going around during the early days of the coronavirus crisis – What entity has brought the most significant digital transformation to your organization? The answer was not the CIO or the CEO, but the Coronavirus Pandemic. Along with the near-global lockdown and economic disruption, the pandemic brought, at best, inconstancy and uncertainty and, at worst, severe anxiety and depression to a vast majority of people. In this scenario, leaders within organizations found themselves changing track overnight—from a predominant focus on achieving business goals to supporting the people behind them—yes, as enablers of business goals and as extensions of leaders themselves, threads of shared humanity. And the shift in focus towards people and their changing work and consumption habits necessitated a change in technology models to support new ways of thinking, working, living, and engaging.

As I see it, there are four principal leadership needs emerging as we move into the future, regardless of whether we call it the "next to normal" or the "never normal"

1. Servant Leadership

In Hermann Hesse's book, Journey to the East, he tells the story of Leo, a servant among many others in a traveling group. When problems start cropping up in Leo's absence, the other servants realized how Leo had kept the group together and that he was, in fact, more of their leader than a servant. Leo's story inspired Robert K. Greenleaf to later define 'Servant Leadership' as a management style where the leader's chief focus is to 'enable other people to develop and perform to the best of their abilities.

Over the past few months, the term servant leadership has held growing personal relevance for me. As my team members moved to remote working in unusual circumstances, I often found myself on team calls and one-on-one calls to discuss our personal lives more than work. Everyone knew their job and was doing it – where they needed help was managing stress and uncertainty and the nitty-gritty of work-personal life balance. As leaders in our organization, it became our predominant role to support our teams in every possible way only – emotionally and in terms of resources, with clarity and transparency in communication. More than anything else, it was the acknowledgment of our shared vulnerability during the pandemic that significantly brought everyone together, with a greater resolve to unite and tide through the times – together.

2. A larger perspective on Diversity and Inclusion

In recent years, most organizations have become increasingly aware of different kinds of biases we all have and have been actively trying to find systemic and personal ways to eliminate discrimination, especially in terms of class, gender, and race at work and life outside work. Yet, organizational culture is siloed in more ways than we routinely think. Leaders, rather than entire teams, think about strategy and direction. We discuss work issues with our colleagues more than with our family or friends. We expect great ideas to come from a particular set of individuals. The pandemic blurred our usual lines of interaction, families started occasionally joining in on work calls, and teammates joined in on virtual needs more often than they may have in person. We often found some of the most valuable ideas and solutions come from unexpected quarters – from children who are digital natives or relatively junior folks in the organization with fresh perspectives.

““An inclusive leader welcomes everyone as an equal collaborator. They create an environment where everyone can be themselves, play to their strengths, ask for help, and work together to get better solutions,””

— says Ben Renshaw, leadership coach, and author

The most successful leaders of the future will be those who value all voices equally, and in turn, get an equal representation of ideas from the rich spectrum of human experience.

3. Agility and not being a "know all'

Last year has proven that even great leaders or managers may not have the "farsight" to foresee what's coming, what would change, or what actions are needed. Individuals and companies who have survived or thrived have either adapted or learned to become agile. Agile leadership primarily focuses on building collaborative learning environments, quickly acting on feedback from the larger ecosystem (Partners, Customers, Stakeholders, Shareholders, and Government) to drive the business forward. Agility is not about living in the moment and taking it as it comes; the focus should be on taking incremental steps toward the larger goal and purpose.

Organizations and teams look at leaders to answer or solve every question or need statement. In technology, where knowledge is created and curated faster than the speed of light, leaders need to embrace humility and ask for help or guidance for all types of situations. Even if they know or have experienced scenarios, there is no harm in reaching out to their teams or trusted advisors to seek a better way or get guidance on her/his thought process.

4. Fluid teams augmented with real-time insights

The business of the future will be a fast-moving and shape-shifting creature. As the gig economy grows and remote working catches on, your workforce will likely need to be an agile, adaptive entity – shrinking and expanding to suits the demands of a project or situation. What you will need in that scenario are excellent insights systems that augment new teams with real-time, contextual insights to help them rapidly get up to speed and deliver optimally from the get-go.

Instead of hiring a workforce for life, bearing enormous costs of attrition, and losing business through gaps in knowledge transfer, organizations must think of systems – not as clunky repositories – but as agile support tools that can instantly and powerfully empower teams with the knowledge and machine intelligence they need to perform their best. As AI technologies mature and meld with cognitive intelligence, the scope to drive a genuinely insights-powered, lean, and intelligent organization is as broad as it is compelling. Timely information with the right insight has always been a game-changer, but it's your essential survival kit in a changing world.

“The Leader at the end of the tunnel looks different ”

— Anees Merchant

Today, we are all confined to our homes and locality without much movement. What sounded reasonable to all of us:

Going to work/gym/other public places
Taking public transports
Eating out in restaurants
Participating in events or other larger gatherings

Feels a distant dream and confinement to place or home was a scary moment or if we did if we had to take rest for a day. However, most of us are confined to our homes for weeks at a stretch now. The world has come to a standstill, actually humans and machines, yet, nature is blooming, and other living beings are thriving. The Pandemic of COVID-19 has challenged all of our thinking and movement in the so-called technology and thriving 20th century.

The current times are challenging and world political leaders, large-medium-small organizations are relooking at their business models, and human beings at large are adjusting to a new normal at the same time contributing to fight out the pandemic. The novel Coronavirus doesn't have precedence Individuals, organizations, and countries would only thrive if they can quickly adapt to changing and evolving scenarios. The scenarios are rapidly evolving, and what seemed to be the benchmark yesterday has been disrupted today completely. Countries, organizations, and communities which have shown agility, swiftness, and accepting change have been able to arrest and control to an extent the situation.

Agility is a mindset than a process that is either born out of a will or a necessity. Organizations that have been slow to adopt an agile mindset or methods are today, finding it difficult to survive or manage the current situation. What I fear is that, once hopefully, the pandemic is over, and either the circumstances take an upswing turn or goes in another direction, organizations again would not be prepared to manage it. The systems, checks, and controls would all go out of the window, and larger cracks would start forming within an organization.

More so, industry experts deem that great leaders have to balance agility with consistency in the current state, and once we all come out of it, to adjust consistency would be the biggest challenge for many leaders. The past, present, and future all would have different benchmarks and standards that define consistency would be the biggest challenge. The only way to manage consistency would be to embrace empathy, listening, and to stay true to oneself, brand, and the country at large. Consumers and the nations would evolve at a rapid pace, and there would be new benchmarks set every day. The future would require a great sense of agility and the ability to balance the other moving pieces around oneself, organization, and the nation as a whole.

It is still not that late to develop an agile mindset, but those who don't would perish. Chao..