5 Things Leaders Do Differently

The booming start-up culture is witnessing a surge of new-age leaders. Armed with disruptive ideas and technological advances in their respective fields, these leaders have also adopted distinct ways to assess their own career path, testing the relevance of their skills as well as bringing their teams up to speed in order to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving industry environment.

Let’s look at how these leaders are doing things differently.

Assessing their own career

It may sound as simple as standing in front of the mirror, but in reality, leaders truly master the art of assessing their career with a discerning eye.

Good leaders understand the importance of an evaluation that bypasses circumstances, situational context as well as any other influencing factor to test their careers for productivity, ambition and interest levels.

Former Marine Corps Officer, leadership coach, trainer, speaker and entrepreneur Richard Rierson credits leadership assessment tools for helping him begin his entrepreneurial journey. He says the assessment tools helped him pinpoint his ambition. Today, he is a leadership expert hired by organizations to dramatically improve individual and organizational effectiveness.

No guesswork!

Today’s job market and in-demand skills are significantly different from the ones five years ago. The new-age leaders have adapted well to this constantly changing need and employ new assessment tools to gauge their organization’s skills. Industry relevant skills are preferred over college grades and company leaders value a whole new set of qualities while forming their teams.

In 2018, LinkedIn surveyed over 2,000 business leaders and found that 57% identified soft skills as most important to them.

Tools like MeritTrac’s communication assessment solutions holistically assess a candidate’s soft skills to help company leaders evaluate how trainable employees are for leadership.

Leading by example

The new age leaders share a very strong trait. They are expert problem solvers. If you look at all the leading startup ventures today, you’ll see that they fundamentally solve people’s problems. Be it hiring a cab, ordering food online or finding your way on map. They showcase this quality and lead by example within their organization too. The company mindset focuses on problem solving through collaboration and cross-functional support.

Amazon’s chief, Jeff Bezos credits his grandfather for teaching him problem solving and self-reliance early in his life at ranch. He explains that resourcefulness and self-reliance were the qualities he picked from him and encourages his teams to use on a daily basis.

Turning feedback into fuel

Leaders today believe in nurturing talent in-house. They go by the ideology “Hire for Attitude and Train for Skills.” This essentially involves continuous learning programs and periodic assessments to pinpoint and fill skill gaps. However, where new age leaders really stand out is in providing feedbacks.

The feedback are no more a vague play of words, but quantitative assessment of a candidate’s strength and weaknesses along with an improvement strategy to help individuals benefit from their feedback.

The ‘people analytics team’ at Google, which gathers tons of employee data, discovered the importance of feedback for new employees to boost productivity. Google is full throttle on providing real-time performance feedback to its employees from peer-2-peer and uses it as one of the core pillars for motivating employees.

Workforce Development Assessment Solutions by MeritTrac are extensively employed by new age leaders for this purpose.

Redefining boss-employee relation

While leadership may involve a certain amount of authority, the leaders today are embracing flat hierarchy models, breaking down cubicles and encouraging pursuit of own self-defined professional goals within the company. And remarkable results have shown where employees have come up with novel business ideas while working on side projects.

Self-improvement tools play a vital role in such work environments to help employees work on certain aspects of their skills and make the most of the flexible work environment.

Image source:

• richardrierson.com
• Forbes