4 Leadership Trends to Watch in 2023
Nicole Martin: I would propose these aren’t just trends as we have been employing such trends in my business for over a decade. A great skim the 1st day in the new year. Happy New Year!
If it feels like we spent 2022 learning how to adapt faster—to keep up with the shift from the Great Resignation to the Great Reshuffle, the Great Application to the phenomenon of Quiet Quitting—it seems much of 2023 may lead us to really focus on how we can take care of employees better, even if that means standing on a chair and fixing a light every now and then.
With that in mind, below are my thoughts on four trends to watch this year.
YOUR WORKPLACE IS ON THE HOOK FOR WELL-BEING
For years, many leaders viewed their roles as shepherds of better business outcomes: better revenues, more profits, more growth. But with the likes of the U.S. Surgeon General’s report in October warning that toxic workplaces are harmful to people’s mental and physical health, leaders will need to take a more proactive approach to employee well-being. No longer will it be enough for companies to reimburse gym memberships, offer access to financial advisors or encourage the use of mindfulness apps. Now, organizations are also responsible for taking care of the physical and mental well-being of their employees.
IT’S TIME TO FOCUS ON A NEW KIND OF SAFETY
With layoffs already hitting the tech sector and murmurs of a potential economic downturn, it can be tempting to go into protection mode at work: to stay quiet and not speak up, to keep ideas to ourselves. It’s a natural reaction that when we feel threatened we clam up.
But now is perhaps the most important time to be courageous, share ideas, and challenge other people’s thinking. In this economy, the need for innovation is not going away; if anything, it’s accelerating.
DON’T JUST RESPECT DIFFERENCES, DESIGN FOR THEM
Most organizational people strategies are built on the idea that employees are relatively the same when it comes to how they see the world or what motivates them. Yet neuroscience shows every person’s brain processes the world uniquely. Even identical twins can have radically different neurological responses to the same experience. That’s because, while our genes determine how our brain is largely organized and where our neurons should be placed, environments and experiences throughout life shapes how they act. The result is that no two brains are exactly alike.
WE’RE ALL STILL IN RECOVERY
Over the past three years, we’ve all been through intense collective experiences: a pandemic that disrupted our sense of safety in so many ways; repeated tragic episodes of police violence and mass murder; a war in Ukraine; an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol and more. This combination of both discrete and prolonged experiences has left us trying to recover from something called collective trauma—which goes beyond immediate bodily reactions to trauma and includes our memory of traumatic events that we discuss or recollect as a way to make sense of what we’ve all experienced. This has exacerbated burnout, challenges in accessing mental health, and prompted many people to reevaluate what’s important in their lives.
What this means in the workplace is that we all must understand how our needs—as leaders, employees and humans—may be different in a post-traumatic context. What may be a reaction to a relatively recent event could be entirely different than a reaction to repeated or extended trauma.
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Read the entire article here https://www.fastcompany.com/90824676/leadership-trends-2023
by David Rock
David Rock is cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a cognitive-science consultancy that has advised more than 50% of the Fortune 100, and the author of Your Brain at Work.
