LEADERS
DIGEST
LEADERSHIP 52: What the years have taught me If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from my career spanning 20 years and including everything from engineering to software development to manufacturing automation, it’s this: It’s never about the tools that I use, nor the hard skills that I have. There are two reasons for this: 1. As you move up the corporate ladder, others carry out the actual execution, and the skillsets required of you are to manage that execution. 2. The technology keeps changing faster than you will be able to adapt to it. This is why I was heartened to see the Future of Jobs report that highlighted the skills of the future. Published by the World Economic Forum, the report lists the following as among the top 10 most valuable skills in times to come: • Critical & Creative Thinking • People Management & Coordination • Emotional Intelligence • Problem Solving & Decision Making • Service Orientation, Negotiation and • Cognitive Flexibility. I would like to take the liberty to call this leadership.
It’s not just about telling people what to do We are accustomed to defining (or perhaps limiting?) leadership as behavior that is attributed to good 12
Issue 42 I August 2020
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If you would like to get ahead and address the most important gap in the workforce, then Leadership 52 was built for you.
people managers. It is almost like you climb a ladder from individual contributor to manager to leader. We at Leaderonomics take a broader view of leadership. It starts with our Science of Building Leaders (SOBL), where we outline the different aspects of development that a leader must go through; from Agency, to having a Secure Base and Crucible Moments, to many more critical experiences. For more on this, read here. We then looked at working professionals and how we could help them develop their leadership competencies. Looking at a typical progression, it is clear that leadership starts with managing yourself and your tasks, and later develops into managing your relationships with others. This is followed by managing teams and projects and making decisions. Though the scope of these skills grow as your career progresses, the fundamentals of leadership remain the same.
How Leadership 52 came to be Through our exploration of these fundamentals, we developed our Leadership 52 competency pathways, known as L52. Through the L52 competencies, you are assured to develop every aspect of being a leader today (regardless of your role). Why 52? There are fifty-two topics that we believe every leader should master, and in a specific sequence. The goal was to identify a holistic leadership development plan. This turned out to be 52
