From Challenges into Opportunities: The New Leadership Agenda

1. Rebuilding Company Culture 

Consider company culture, for instance, which in many organisations remains in a state of flux. Moving from a situation where it was created and fostered inside buildings and passed from person to person, to a place where today, digital communication channels now play a huge role in the attitudes and behaviours that represent businesses and their employees.

Without a doubt, this has been a difficult, and sometimes uncomfortable journey for teams. In some cases, culture has been reborn in an effort to recognise the new priorities of employees, many of whom spend at least some of their time working remotely.

Looking ahead, leaders need to take the opportunity to have conversations, listen, and embrace a new culture driven by a new generation of employees whose personal priorities are more fundamentally diverse and inclusive than ever before. As this transformative process continues to unfold, leaders need to create organisations that understand how businesses are being judged by current and potential employees.

2. How to Overcome the ‘Great Resignation’ 

Changing attitudes towards work and careers have manifested themselves in a variety of ways, with one of the most interesting being the ‘great resignation’. Without a doubt, many people have reprioritised their values and preferences in a way they may never have considered without the impact of lockdown. Hybrid working gave everyone a chance to enjoy a wider variety of experiences during time that would have been previously spent in – and travelling to and from – offices.

The result is that many of us have reassessed goals and aspirations, with different ways to balance careers, family, and friends coming to the fore. Increasingly this means that if a job isn’t fulfilling enough, people will move or, at the very least, embrace the opportunity to work remotely as much as possible.

From a recruitment perspective, the shift in emphasis has been profound. Questions being asked in interviews by prospective employees, for instance, are deeper and more challenging than ever before. Indeed, many employers have found that the tables have turned and candidates are interviewing them, with corporate culture, values, plans, and commitments at the heart of their decisions about who to work for.

As a result, leaders must recognise that career paths are becoming less linear. People want new challenges and experiences alongside a more equitable work-life balance. Corporate values, the roles on offer, the rewards for doing those jobs, and the working environments businesses provide, need to change for good.

The reality is that attracting and retaining the very best talent requires attention, training, personalised development, and incentive plans for the long term. Crucial to this process are leaders who are prepared to have conversations, listen, and assess so they can understand the nature of changing attitudes to work and careers before acting.

3. Taking Responsibility for Employee Wellbeing 

Forward-thinking leaders remain focused on identifying and working on resolving the issues around employee wellbeing. Attitudes and opinions around best practices vary, but many organisations are focused on being as flexible as possible and, where practical, are offering a hybrid environment so employees can come into the office setting when they need to.

The challenge here is that there’s no ‘one size fits all’ approach – each organisation is unique. The underlying issue, however, is that leaders must finally take responsibility for employee wellbeing. Doing so means our working lives must be flexible, sustainable, fair, and with diversity and inclusion providing a foundation for a positive shared future.

Make no mistake, this is no longer a side issue. Employee wellbeing has a direct impact on individual and collective success and leaders who can build an organisational culture that is demonstrably focused on their people will put themselves in an ideal position to flourish in the long term. And for today’s leaders, who have experienced problems unprecedented in living memory, focusing on the future is a question of mindset where challenges become opportunities.