Leadership Traits for an
Unwritten Future

Business leaders should be humble and avoid the temptation of sticking with decisions made using outdated data. Do keep reviewing your data and keep adjusting your team goals based on objective, good-quality, and trustworthy information, and shift course whenever needed.

Use this year to review your company data and how it is processed, so you and your organization can read it more clearly and faster.

The world has never changed so fast and unpredictably as now, in a time where geographical, political, and big economic decisions change without much warning. Being an ostrich leader may run your business into the ground alongside your head.

By the time we go back to a new and more predictable normal, a part of your staff will be experiencing some level of trauma and loss – whether in their lives, due to health or economical suffering from someone they know and care; or in their workplace, due to colleagues that have lost their jobs, or the sense of struggle and lack of control new job practices have put on them.

Moving fast and effectively on building empathy as a business leader will help your teams rebound faster and will set up a stronger foundation for success on similar challenges ahead, building a more motivated workforce.

An example was the May 5th, Brian Chesky public letter addressing his Airbnb employees regarding the layoff of 25% of staff globally. A very difficult moment not only for any CEO, but equaly difficult for any business and brand. By being very transparent and embedding his feelings, he portrayed himself and the company as very human and relatable, and transformed a delicate PR moment, into very a positive one, where his letter was shared and praised by millions.

The office was where employees worked, and even the location of the office, whether around the world or inside the city, also affected business performance in most industries. But most businesses around the world were pushed suddenly into remote working.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” The quarter is the new year, and the fastest will win. Some were better prepared than others, but it has been a quick and steep learning curve for all. When I look at the road ahead, I see a future where staff, or parts of it, will work from home. I see an opportunity for presenting employees flexibility as a perk, for cutting fixed costs in workplaces, and for tapping into a much larger pool of talent, without the hassle of visas, relocation, cultural adaptation, and in most cases, with decreased human resources costs.

What starts as a challenge can become an opportunity for collaboration across the globe. With COVID-19, our Superunion team in London feels as close as the Superunion team in Hong Kong or Sao Paulo. The only barrier is time-zone and in very few cases, language. But all those are minor barriers. COVID-19 disconnected us physically from the colleagues we used to sit next to, but connected us virtually with everyone in our agency network, no matter where they are located. This means we can truly source globally for the best talent in our network to place in a client project, creating stronger project teams. We can also work more efficiently around the globe, taking advantage of multiple time-zones, and drive through progress faster due to seamless continuity.

It’s also an opportunity to explore all the new cloud tools available to managers that have spawned across the last decade, understand the ones that are practical and applicable to your business operations, and invest further in virtual team collaboration. Integrate these digital tools across your network, and standardize work procedures, so anyone at any time can plug in or out, independently of geographical company culture, language, or time-zone.

As higher data bandwidths across the globe expand and become more accessible, digital tools only previously available in a physical, centralized workplace will make it possible to access computational power or tools from any device – reducing investment in hardware and IT per worker, and allowing businesses to scale their workforce faster to be more reactive to the market.

Other sectors have not faced such an obvious necessity to evolve in their digital transformation – but that can be more dangerous. Business leaders in these sectors may not have felt the need directly, but that doesn’t mean change isn’t happening and your competition isn’t already taking advantage of it.

When Winston Churchill was working to form the United Nations after WWII, he famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. This is still pretty good advice. The market is ripe for innovation, risk, and transformation. Not only for the world but for your team and your clients. The average person doesn’t hope for change in their workplace, their job responsibilities, or their company business practices, but this year, people are more ready and willing to adapt. Innovation is accepting risk and failure into the business equation, and currently, the market is more willing to accept failure caused by progress.

During past world crises, companies with resilient, future-ready, and innovation-focused business models have grown away from their competitors, and the ones with legacy or stale business models have fallen behind or didn’t survive.

There’s a long list of companies that were perfectly positioned for innovation and were leaders in their industry, but due to their risk-averse vision or long development times, were left bankrupt or eclipsed by smaller competitors that took risks. On this laggard list are names such as Nokia, GM, Atari, MySpace, Compaq, Blockbuster, Kodak, and Toys’R’Us.

On the other side of this spectrum are names such as Nike, Apple, Google, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon and Alibaba. These companies have an internal culture prone to inspire ambition, they put their talent first, manage their innovation funnel carefully, and grant their innovation teams wide autonomy and power.