Qualities of Good Leadership for the Future: How Will Leaders Be Successful?

Certain leadership qualities are important now and in the future: emotional intelligence EQ as well as cognitive intelligence IQ, confidence, ability to articulate and inspire a vision, ability to motivate, unfaltering optimism, perseverance, resilience, and strategic decision making.

In my executive coaching work with clients, leaders consistently rate integrity and honesty as the most important leadership competencies. People choose to follow leaders they can trust.

Which leadership companies do you believe will be the most important for your organization in the future?

Leadership Qualities for Successful Leaders

The question remains – no matter what the product or services – how will business be conducted in the future and what will be required for leaders to succeed?

To be sure, some leadership qualities will always be important: intelligence (emotional as well as cognitive), confidence, ability to articulate and inspire a vision, ability to motivate, unfaltering optimism, perseverance, resilience, and strategic decision making.

Recent company bankruptcies have also shown that leaders need to have moral and ethical values to make difficult and even unpopular decisions that are beneficial to stakeholders in the long term.

The Impact of Technology

Technological advances are not only speeding up communications, but also enabling rapid input from customers, suppliers, employees and all stakeholders. Technology itself has created new challenges for leaders and for all knowledge workers wishing to succeed in their roles.

While technological advances can save considerable time and money, here are some of the challenges that they have created for us.

1.  Learning new technical skills: Executives must continually update their skills and remain open to learning how to work with new hardware and software systems. It is no longer sufficient to depend on technical specialists. What were considered basic computer skills in the past are no longer good enough. Leaders must know how to use new devices and programs to their best advantage.  This requires constant learning and keeping an open mind. What worked in the past won’t work in the future.

2.  Decision-making on technical issues: Leaders must be able to make decisions about which technological advances have importance for their organizations, which purchases to make and where to allocate resources. Without this capacity to judge the value of technical advances, they risk spending money in the wrong places.

3.  Managing time and information: All persons, but especially leaders, will have to manage their time and information flow more efficiently, in order to be able to respond effectively and in a timely manner to new input from stakeholders. It does no good to have client input available if the organization’s system cannot handle the information and respond to customer demands, complaints and requests. It does no good to have email availability among workers and managers if no one reads and responds to emails in a timely fashion. Time is not the issue here, knowledge systems and time management are.

4.  Leading virtually: Greater capacity for instant communications opens possibilities for working with suppliers in foreign countries at lower prices than can be achieved domestically. Leaders must be able to support and coordinate virtual work teams.  Working virtually is not the same as managing in person, and requires new skills. Expect to see increased use of virtual conferencing technologies.

5.  Leading diverse cultures: Working with an expanded global environment brings challenges of communicating effectively with different cultures. In the future, leaders will be required to have unique abilities to inspire and motivate others with different perspectives, values, cultures, and religions, as well as multi-generational age groups.

6.  People development: Leaders will have to be adept at bringing out the best in their people, who have more decision-making responsibility with customers and stakeholders in a rapid response environment. Leaders will be required to learn and use effective coaching skills.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the BarOn EQi and CPI 260 can help you become a a more inspiring and visionary leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and social intelligence, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.