Leadership success looks different today

Turbulent business landscapes are today’s reality

The digital age has presented a host of new challenges for leaders as well as a sharp decline in their success rates. Through over five years of research, we’ve identified several leadership behaviors that provide the greatest chance for a company to survive and thrive in these turbulent times.

Trust is a key foundation for successful leadership in the digital age. In this video, AchieveForum CEO Scott Bohannon talks about the role trust plays in day-to-day life at AchieveForum.

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Our research and most of our clients tell us the workplace is a challenging place, and it’s being felt at all levels.

ALL Employees

  • Change fatigue, a lack of clarity, and nearly constant stress

  • Fear of speaking up about quality, safety, and compliance issues

  • Fear of sharing opportunities and risks to the business

  • Too hard (and risky) to get things done

  • Wage and opportunity discrimination for women and minorities

Front-Line Managers

  • Frustration with millennials and retention of them

  • Difficulty getting employees to behave as desired

Mid-Level Managers

  • Teams aren’t adapting and innovating enough

Senior Most Managers

  • Frequent surprise

  • Struggle in making their strategic and operating plans

  • Short shelf life of strategic and operating plans

  • Acquisitions don’t yield the promised benefits

Workplace challenges have real impacts to business. Research shows all of these factors matters to the bottom line.

$1 trillion

higher care costs, lost productivity, and missed opportunites

75%

lack an adequate pool of ready successors

38%-50%

executives fail in their first 18 months

50%-74%

transformations are unsuccessful

Factors impacting leadership success

We’ve spent more than six years researching why leadership success looks different in the digital age.

Three important factors are at the center:

  • The pace of change is dramatically higher. In fact, it’s essentially constant.

  • Work has become much more uncertain. Our probability models and expectations don’t paint a very accurate picture in many cases and we can large surprises far more often.

  • The very nature of work has changed. Specialization of labor and manufacturing practices have been replaced with collaborative, co-creative work that is different almost every day.

When you put those three forces together you get the shift you see from left to right in this image. Leadership success requires shifting from engaging millennials to teaching them to lead, from coping with stress to building resilience, from building alignment to building trust. And so on. Embrace experimentation, focus on team, influence behavior, foster co-creating, and apply discovery-based planning.

  • Engage Millennials
  • Cope
  • Build Alignment
  • Get it Right
  • Focus on Manager+Individual
  • Change Behavior
  • Foster Coordination+Cooperation
  • Use Strategic Planning
  • Teach Millennials to Lead
  • Build Resilience
  • Build Trust
  • Embrace Experimentation
  • Focus on Team
  • Influence Behavior
  • Foster Co-Creation
  • Apply Discovery-based Planning

New tools for digital success

The Leading in the Digital Age Suite of offerings is designed specifically to support leadership success in the digital age. To help leaders make the shifts needed, we’re building solutions with three main parts:

  • A focus on content appropriate for the Digital Age capabilities we’ve identified

  • Pre-designed, ready to use learning journeys, with content, built around those capabilities

  • Application contexts which provide additional tools and advice for applying these skills to common, important large-scale organizational needs

Supporting the entire suite of programs and included in every learning journey are programs about Building Trust. Trust is a crucial factor as the world of work becomes even faster and more confusing. Fast-paced adapting requires an environment where people can jump in and try new things, without the fear of failure. For that reason, all the key leadership practices for the digital age have at their foundation continuously building and rebuilding trust.

7 Learning Journeys

  • Leading for Resilience

  • Leading in the Digital Matrix

  • Influencing Behavior Change

  • Building High Performing Teams

  • Building Next Gen Leadership

  • Leading Co-Creation

  • Leading Discovery

4 Application Contexts

  • Leading Virtually

  • Leading through Mergers and Acquisitions.

  • Next Generation Inclusion

  • High Performing Finance Leaders