Books | Future-ready | Leadership

Podcast: Building tomorrow’s leaders today

Where are we going to find tomorrow’s leaders?

We’ve been doing these podcasts for more than a year now, and as much talking as we’ve done about the future, the missing ingredient in all of those conversations has been leadership. We just haven’t spent much time talking about future leadership, and with 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day, that’s a critical part of becoming future-ready.

So this week, we are speaking with Emmanuel Gobillot and Katherine Harris, co-authors of Unleash Your Leader: How to Win in Business. It's a blueprint of sorts for how you can turn yourself into a great leader, teaching us what we should be doing today to improve our odds of becoming the leaders of tomorrow.

Katherine is the founder and managing director of Collaboration Partners in London. She’s built a career based on her fascination around what differentiates individual performance and how organizations can best support and encourage excellence.

Emmanuel, meanwhile — a longtime friend of the MACPA and the BLI — has been described as “the first leadership guru for the digital generation” and “the freshest voice in leadership today.” He’s one of Europe’s most sought-after leadership speakers, and he has quite literally written the books about 21st century leadership: The Connected Leader, Leadershift, and Follow the Leader.

In this conversation, we cover:

  • How we can prepare ourselves to be great leaders when we’re so busy.
  • Why we need to work in the business today while, at the same time, working on the business as it must exist tomorrow.
  • The vital need for curiosity.
  • How to build networks that will allow us to expand our perspectives almost exponentially.

Listen to our conversation here:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/futureready/MASTER_-_FP_051_-_Gobillot_and_Thomas.mp3

 

Three elements of great leadership Emmanuel and Katherine teach us that, to transition from where we are now to becoming a great leader, we have to master three elements of great leadership.

First is what they call Vertical Agility. That’s the ability to both run a business and to change or adapt that business. The key there is being able to do both at once, and at a speed that differentiates.

The second is what they call Steadfast Impact, and here’s how they define it: “You need to appeal to multiple constituencies by being flexible enough to adapt your message without ever compromising on what you hold to be true, but always be willing to question your thinking.” So, it’s all about combining consistency and differentiation.

The third element is something they call Boundless Perspective. “To be successful, we need to be able to scan our environment from the broadest perspective and bring the outside in,” Emmanuel and Katherine write. “We need to see the wood from the trees while operating at a speed where everything is blurred. We need to have networks that span way beyond what we would normally consider useful to unearth value others seldom see. Boundless perspective is After reading that passage, we knew we had to talk to these two – and we think anyone serious about the future of their business or industry should probably do the same."

Resources:

Profile

William D. Sheridan