Employees no longer snap to attention and are not subservient, as in the past. This doesn't mean that leadership is redundant. On the contrary, it requires more thoughtful and meaningful leadership.
New leaders need to challenge people to depart from the patterns of the past, stirring the pot instead of putting on the lid. New leaders are creators of chaos as much as originators of order.
The leadership task is to support the organisation in managing order and chaos; provide direction, encourage experimentation, educate like a coach and understand people.
Direction is not a matter of command and control, but of focus; encouraging people to focus on what really matters. Visions should be unique; simple to be shared and clear in stating what an organisation should not be doing.
In addition, organisations also need short-term goals that inspire change, which themselves change over time. Besides all these, people must want to belong.
Traditionally, businesses have been built around spurts of creation and extended periods of exploitation. Organisations exploited natural resources, technologies, and people. We are good at exploitation because we have the experience and are damn good at it.
We know exactly what to do when we find a gold mine and when we are done, we look for the next one. In contrast, we're not very good at creation. Our societies are not built for it, our organisations are not designed for it, and most people are not trained for it.
Innovation requires experimentation, and experiments are risky. So, an innovative environment must have an exceptionally high tolerance for mistakes.
Traditional organisations are not forgiving environments. This not only stops people from failing, it stops them from trying! It leads to the institution of controls and creates fear that acts against the innovative spirit. The challenge for leaders is to make it less risky to take risks.
Development is about mentoring and coaching. It is the job of leaders to create new leaders. The distinction between learning, working, and living is gone. Education is as much about improving the processes in which we work and getting to know the people around us, as it is about reading yet another book.
Education is a competitive weapon; for individuals as well as organisations. If you want to attract and retain the best people, you will have to train them; and while this has happened, the nature of education has also fundamentally changed. Tacit knowledge is important. Teaching and learning on the job is vital.
To attract and retain good talent, we have to treat people as individuals. We are moving towards one-to-one leadership so every little system needs to be personalised. People can be approached, evaluated, rewarded, and inspired in a number of different ways.
Motivation is increasingly based on values rather than money and is increasingly complex. If people and their motivations differ, rewards must differ. We are used to differentiated contracts in every other market, except labour.
While standard contracts are acceptable in a mass-production context, they are hardly applicable to an office full of highly-charged brains with widely different reasons for being there.
Today's employees are more questioning and demanding. They are confident enough to air their concerns, grievances, and aspirations. If they were customers, we would call them sophisticated. It is perhaps significant that we tend not to. Maybe we should. Perhaps we must!
Whether we do or not, our beliefs about people, which shapes our attitude and manifests itself in our behaviour as leaders, will tell the tale.
Sanjiv Anand is Managing Director and Rajesh Iyer is Director at Cedar Management Consulting International.
By Sanjiv Anand and Rajesh Iyer, Special to Gulf News