I have been involved in business leadership and leadership development for over twenty-five years. During that time I have experienced and been continually learning from good leadership, bad leadership and everything in between, from those who have the substance to be leaders to those who should be nowhere near leading organisations or people. 

Now more than ever, as the workplace and the nature of work evolves at a breathless pace, to remain agile and make decisions in a timely manner, today’s leaders are tasked with navigating a safe passage through their unpredictable business waters by negotiating the constant waves of change, disruption and uncertainty, whilst all the time engaging with and protecting their people. 

The delivery of effective and empathetic leadership has never been more important. This new environment, impacted on new ways of working, technology and a more intense focus on people and work-life balance, means that leaders need to be a lot more than merely a ‘figure head’ or a ‘big picture’ strategist focusing on results and impact. 

The new world of work demands that leaders be different from those who have gone before. Working at a higher level with clarity and an awareness that new issues have to be addressed in order to help both organisations and their people get set up for success, today’s leaders need to consider: 

• Developing their mindset. 
• Being emotionally intelligent. 
• Enabling cohesion and collaboration. 
• Embracing diversity and inclusion. 
• Hybrid and Remote Working. 
• Communicating to engage. 
• Innovating constantly. 
• Rethinking risks and being prepared to fail. 
• Learning and improving. 
• Moving from sustainable leadership to regenerative leadership.

To me, it was both concerning and surprising in equal measure that the most sought-after leadership skill during the Covid-19 Pandemic was ‘empathy’! One would have assumed that this was a ‘given’ for leaders, the need to lead with empathy and understanding to engage with their people. Who knew that this wasn’t the case? This coupled with the list above, shows that we must accept that leadership needs to, and must, change in order to be ‘fit-for-purpose' in today’s work environment. 

I said at the start that I had been in and around leadership for a long time, continually learning from the examples that I experienced. From that personal perspective, I would like to share my ‘Baker’s Dozen’ of the things that leaders must be mindful of in their practice, as apt today as they were during the twenty-odd years of considering them (in no particular order): 

1. Be self-aware. 
2. Be authentic. 
3. Show empathy. 
4. Be consistent. 
5. Be honest. 
6. Show integrity. 
7. Have purpose and focus. 
8. Be humble. 
9. Be situational and transformational. 
10. Banish your biases. 
11. Be resilient. 
12. Be curious and think differently. 
13. Be a lifelong learner. 

As modern leadership evolves to meet the diverse challenges of the world of work, we need to both accept and understand that the ‘Leadership Journey’ is a never-ending one and that there will never be a leader who we can look at and say they are the ‘finished article’.

Just saying...until the next time!