How to manage talent

 New skills required for the work of the future will define talent and employability of professional profiles.

How to foster and manage new talent? I.e., what leadership qualities should be fostered and what kind of team dynamics work best?

Companies are increasingly flatter and less hierarchical; their teams self-manage and agility in problem solving, and decision making is vital—the much-mentioned “AGILE” concept applied to a new way of working: agile management.

All these conditions put together drive forward the need for a new type of leadership: lateral leadership. Pamela Mead illustrates it with the concepts that appear in Tim Herbig’s book Lateral Leadership: A Practical Guide for Agile Product Managers.

In short, lateral leadership:

1. Requires teams to align with a committed vision and to support it as best they can without formal authority.
2. Describes the art of effectively influencing those around us without formal authority.
3. Combines two key features: sharing a common culture and values and having empathy.

The foundations for success are people and culture, according to the serial entrepreneur Vincent Rosso, who is behind the launch of BlaBlaCar in Spain and co-founder and CEO of Consentio, and shared some remarks in one of our “Coffee with entrepreneurs”(in Spanish)..

Pamela Mead shared more keys regarding the new leadership:

• Commit to diversity and inclusion, especially at the executive levels of the company.
• Fight against ageism—discriminating on the basis of age.
• Maintain an elevated level of personal integrity.
• Work with multidisciplinary teams.

We went from teams whose mission was to do the boss’s bidding to teams that cared about a shared outcome, and that are very committed to the company. Teams of incredibly talented professionals and perhaps with strong personalities, but that know how to set aside their egos.

If we want to lead such teams, we must submerge ourselves in our company’s culture and values and make them our own. This is the only way to bring about real change in the way people think, feel and act.

At the intersection of lateral leadership and collaborative digital platforms, the concept of leadership as a service has emerged: LaaS -Leadership as a Service-. FTF expert, Ulla Luukas, Partnerships Director at Howspace, explains LaaS in the following video:

To conclude, we stress the importance of cultivating empathy. If we want to be prepared to lead the future, Cristina Aranda recommends keeping in mind Maya Angelou ‘s words:

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou