To keep up, a leader and manager today has to DO well at the following:[/b][/b]
Get back to basics when everything around you diverts you into complexity
Make strategic planning a way of life in your organization
Set clear expectations of what excellence looks like
Communicate constantly about your strategies and excellence
Build a high performing culture that supports your strategies and brings them to life
Provide continuous feedback
Constantly learn and unlearn
Certain aspects and behaviors of leaders and managers those were important twenty five years ago are still critical today and will likely still lay important 100 years from now. These include acting with integrity, leading by example, developing talent and ensuring customer satisfaction/loyalty.
Creating a two way relationship is critical especially considering that many knowledge workers today know more about what they are doing than their boss does.
Appreciating and leveraging diversity is an additional shift that correlates to our world becoming smaller and smaller; the broad expansion of businesses spans seas, cultures, and religions. In addition to these actions and areas of focus, leaders and managers today must be more innovative and more proactive, anticipating problems and opportunities as well as entirely new markets and products.
One of the reasons for this shift is the changing demographics of today's workforce. The explosion of two-wage-earner families has taken a toll on family life. Having a greater number of non-traditional families with single parents has added to this stress.
There are two major factors that have influenced how managers need to behave. The most important change is that the nature of work has gradually evolved from manual labor to knowledge work. Workers have become much better educated and they do not respond well to being ordered around. They want to have a say in how their work is done and they want to have their views respected. Also, the workers often know more about what to do than their managers. Increasing specialization and technological advancement has made it impossible for managers to be as knowledgeable as the people reporting to them.
This has had a dramatic impact on the way managers must manage people. Instead of telling employees what to do, they know need to ASK them what they think should be done. Now, managers need to be facilitators as much as decision makers. Of course this change is still underway and it is gradual because there are still industries that are not so highly knowledge driven.