Future-Proofing Leadership - Thoughts from a Recent Conference

Leaders are undoubtedly caught at the forefront of these monumental changes and are arguably more exposed to them than other employees due to the breadth of their responsibilities. Leaders are expected to continue to deliver excellent results, as well as motivate and lead teams who they almost certainly see less often, but who still look to them for solutions that aren’t yet clear, for unprecedented problems that haven’t been faced before. 

So, in the face of such unprecedented change and pressure, how can Leaders ‘futureproof’ themselves and their organizations when many of the answers cannot be found in traditional working structures or theories? 

One way leaders can do this is to thoroughly understand their teams as individuals and to appreciate that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to motivating and developing employees, especially with four different generations in the workforce and the necessity to increasingly accommodate personal circumstances in the hybrid model. 

The ability to genuinely understand what motivates individuals and to accommodate personal circumstances, and to really dive deep into how individuals work best, also provides an opportunity to improve employee productivity and retention – who doesn’t work well when they feel they are appreciated, understood and encouraged for who they are? The phrase ‘being able to bring your whole self to work’ really does have benefits in this regard. If appreciating individuals as such has positive outputs, why not extend that approach much further into individual career aspirations?

This approach was integral to the development of Saville Assessment’s Wave-i tool.

As an end-to-end solution for strategically identifying and developing emerging talent and leaders, Wave-i avoids the pitfalls of traditional models of potential which tend to present one clear definition of potential and applies it to all types of leadership across all organizations.

This approach fails to account for different types of leadership roles and approaches – and if there’s one trend that has become realized over the last few years, and indeed has always been the case, is that people truly value being treated as individuals. To get the best results from them, they need to be treated as such.

Therefore, if organizations see the value in accommodating employees’ personal circumstances as much as possible through a hybrid working model, surely there is huge value in taking time to explore models of career growth that are targeted to the individual and in entrenching in your culture an idea that not only does everyone have potential for something, but increased organizational and individual self-awareness leads to better career outcomes for all.  

And this is at the heart of what Wave-i helps to uncover. Developed based on over 7,000 ratings of potential, refined to maximize fairness on an international dataset of 18,000, and further explored using an additional sample of over 30,000, Wave-i reduces the odds of wrongly identifying potential from 1 in 5 to 1 in 50, utilizing our 3P model that accurately reveals the types of career or leadership role an individual will thrive in: