Leaders come in different shapes and sizes. They may subscribe to a single style of leadership or a combination of the best practices in people management.

Whatever the case, one thing that you have to consider as a team lead, manager or officer of your company is how your leadership principles are influencing the people around you. Your goal is to keep your followers or employees motivated, guided and engaged.

While the majority of companies, or a good 89% of them, agree that developing leaders is a worthy business activity, only 10% of C-suite executives think that their leadership programs produce results that are helpful for their organization.

Studies have shown that the most effective leadership initiatives are those that are appropriately directed. They also describe successful companies as being able to adapt their leadership development practices according to their business goals, needs or challenges.

Here are nine leadership trends that have the potential to make an impact in today’s workplace, including your organization.

1. The decrease of age-based seniority

It used to be that senior employees were the first to be promoted to leadership or managerial positions in many companies. However, the entry of millennials into the workforce merits that you re-evaluate your leadership development initiatives, especially since millennials are expected to make up 75% of the global workforce by 2025.

Instead of relying on age or length of service as the basis for promotion, you should come up with other ways to discover leadership talent or capacity across all of your employees, whether they’re Gen X, baby boomers or Gen Y. The key is using relevant strategies that can attract, engage, and retain workers across these generations.

2. Importance of relationships in employee engagement

You need to be the best manager you can be for your employees. There are several ways that you can promote workforce engagement, starting with building relationships with your employees. To realize this goal, you need to focus on specific soft skills, such as emotional intelligence and people skills – because employees feel comfortable toward someone who’s able to relate to their concerns, sentiments or challenges.

3. Redesign of management structure

Ideally, performance management processes should be two-fold. As a leader, you have to help your employees set clear goals and the means of measuring their progress over time.

In return, employees should feel welcome to give their honest assessment of your leadership style, so that everyone in the organization can help build a collaborative environment.

4. Investing in human capital

No matter how far-reaching technologies may become in the future, they cannot replace employees as the most valuable and capable asset of the company. Thus, it’s only wise that you invest in their further learning, because having employees who can work at their full potential will help grow your business.

At the same time, you should be in touch with the need for employees to experience a work-life balance. Free your employees from unnecessary meetings, after-work emails and additional activities to prevent them from feeling overwhelmed.

5. Defining the impact of effective leadership in business

As mentioned earlier, leadership only becomes significant when it’s in line with the thrusts of the organization. When you have a full understanding of what the company believes in and hopes to achieve, you will exert efforts to stay in that direction and, as a result, inspire the same kind of response among the members of your team. Moreover, a unified approach on how to accomplish business targets can set your company apart from the rest of the industry.

6. Improving the quality and level of coaching

There’s no question that coaching is an integral part of leadership development. Through mentoring, you get to know the individual talents in your organization as well as their attributes, including strengths and weaknesses. This will give you a chance to groom high performers for more challenging tasks or to rally behind underachievers, so they feel more included in the team.

For your coaching to matter, you’ll need to study your employees’ learning styles. Make sure that you’re sharing the right content through proper delivery channels to bring about authentic learning in the workplace.

7. Keeping a culture of agility

The rise of new technologies and creative minds are giving way to unprecedented shifts and disruptions in the market, which can prove to be challenging for businesses. These scenarios call for you to be strategically agile in your leadership style, so you can help your organization become more responsive toward emerging demands and opportunities.

In a culture of agility, you’re supposed to keep track of global trends and analyses how these may affect your industry. As a leader, you should be able to educate your employees about current market conditions and influence your employees to be more interested in new ideas, which can bring about improvements or innovations for the company.

8. Making use of technology

Having both the talent and the technology to serve customers is fast becoming a norm in many business organizations. In the same way, you should take advantage of technology to help you in different areas of talent management, such as training, assessments, and other employee development activities.

Through AI technologies, you can gather valuable amounts of data about your employees. These can range from determining your employees’ leave patterns to analyzing your agent’s speech nuances during client calls – all of which can give you insights on how to help your employees perform their tasks better.

Key Takeaways

The times we’re living in are evolving so fast that companies need to come up with brilliant solutions to avoid getting left behind. In 2019, your role as a company leader will be more crucial than ever, especially in addressing the demands and preferences of all types of working demographics. You’ll certainly need to keep building your leadership skills.