Next Generation Leadership: new demands on leaders

Confident thinking and action in dealing with uncertainty and risk is an important prerequisite for future leadership. Crises, stagnation, the shortage of skilled workers and digitalisation stand for a situation in which complexity and volatility place new requirements on leaders.

The Zukunftsinstitut’s Leadership Report 2016 describes these challenges in four points. In future, leadership will have more to do with navigating than with steering. The focus is on enabling: opening up spaces, creating opportunities and offering support so that employees can largely organise themselves.

Courage, respect and appreciation are regarded as the most important prerequisite for an open culture of entrepreneurship. Added to these are framework conditions and incentives such as genuine role models, greater tolerance of mistakes and a comprehensive understanding of innovation and innovation systems.

To meet these challenges successfully, suitable organisational structures, modern learning architectures and interactive learning platforms are needed. They are intended to enable and strengthen the formation of new neural networks in leaders. The keyword for this is neuro-leadership. The focus is on attitude, not behaviour.

To meet these requirements, transformis has developed the Next Generation Leadership concept, NGL for short. It is based on the findings of modern systems theory and on knowledge from neuroscience. Both foundations are presented below before the concept and its implementation are described.

The starting point of the NGL concept is the view of organisations as complex social systems. This abandons the traditional assumption that organisational phenomena can be researched or explained causally.

Organisations are communication systems. The most important communicative event in these systems is the decision. According to this understanding, employees and leaders are not part of the communication system. They are so-called relevant environments.

An image makes this clear. Employees and leaders act as players in a game and make an important contribution to organisational communication. The game with its rules exists even without the players. Only their participation, their communicative contribution, brings the game to life.

The strong life of its own that organisations have has a determining effect on leaders and their behaviour. If collectively anchored expectations are not met, including by leaders, the organisation can react unexpectedly and very strongly. This reaction in turn affects the leaders and their definition of their role.

This results in a changed understanding of the leadership task. It is no longer about making the right decisions oneself. Leadership ensures that all relevant information available inside and outside the company is fed into the ongoing communication process so that wise decisions can be made.

Depending on how well or badly this communication process is designed, the quality of the decisions made changes.

The NGL concept draws on a neuroscientific understanding of the human brain as a dynamic, self-organised system. It consists of a large number of neurons, that is, nerve cells, which are linked to one another in a network through synaptic connections.

According to this understanding, these neural networks exert a massive influence on mental processes: on readiness to perceive, readiness to act, readiness to feel emotion, and motivation.

Contrary to earlier assumptions, the brain is regarded as changeable and capable of learning throughout life. The technical term for this is neural plasticity. The brain is understood as an organ that functions in a similar way to a muscle.

Through the frequent activation of neural networks, that is, through the repetition of patterns of perception, thought and behaviour typical of the person concerned, the networks become stronger over the course of a lifetime. They increasingly lead to well-worn paths. This refers to patterns of experience and reaction that run automatically and often unconsciously for the person.

The reverse also applies. If a network is no longer used, it slowly breaks down, and the person shows a particular behaviour less often.

In learning, new neural networks are built according to this principle. The more often the new behaviour is carried out, the stronger the connection becomes. The less often a behaviour is practised, the weaker the neural connections become. New neural networks thus lead to changed behaviour and experience.

In his book “Fühlen, Denken, Handeln”, Roth describes something all memory functions have in common: they are based on experience-dependent changes in the brain, and these changes form the basis of learning.

New neural networks therefore play an important role in meeting the challenges ahead. The NGL concept understands the brain as a resource- and solution-oriented organ. In this sense, it supports the personal development of leaders and future leaders with a view to the tasks ahead.

According to the concept, the brain has an evaluative function. It identifies behaviours that can harm or benefit psychobiological well-being. A distinction is made between cognitive evaluation systems, which work rationally through the intellect, and affective evaluation systems, which work emotionally through feeling.

The concept assumes that all experiences with objects and situations, together with the associated feelings and bodily sensations, are stored in the emotional experiential memory. In affective evaluation, the brain uses these stored experiences. It thereby helps the person to show a behaviour that enables the greatest possible psychobiological well-being.

These stored experiences are called somatic markers. They react within milliseconds in the categories “good” or “bad” and trigger a corresponding feeling or bodily sensation. People can therefore experience positive and negative markers.

To build neural networks, the NGL concept mainly uses positive somatic markers, which are associated with positive affective reactions and pleasant bodily reactions. This makes use of the resources already available to the leader. The aim is to develop appropriate behaviours on the basis of a self-determined attitude.

Accordingly, the concept relies on resource-oriented self-management. It is based on the assumption that every person largely has the resources needed to master present and future challenges under their own steam.

The basis is in particular the Zurich Resource Model, ZRM for short, developed by Maja Storch and Frank Krause. The model takes neuroscientific knowledge into account and integrates the strengths of elaborate forms of therapy. It concentrates on existing resources instead of trying to work through problems and deficits.

The concept expects this to deliver high transfer efficiency. This means the successful transfer of learned knowledge and skills to everyday private and professional situations.

With the understanding of modern systems theory, the determining forces of an organisation on leaders and the effect of leaders on the organisation are taken into account equally. Profound changes and crises confront companies and leaders with demanding needs for change and development. The volatility of the relevant environments requires organisations to react quickly and flexibly. Personal and organisational learning must be closely interlinked in the process.

The NGL concept ensures that leadership development remains tied to organisational requirements and circumstances and takes into account the relevant environments and their expected developments. The close interlinking of organisational and personal learning is achieved through modern learning architectures.

The starting point of leadership development is the question of which organisational framework conditions must be created and which organisational developments or changes must be initiated in order to secure the company’s existence for the long term. On the basis of these requirements, it is determined what this means for the leaders of the organisation in question.

A well-developed qualification architecture, that is, people development, then sets the pace for the implementation architecture. In parallel with the qualification phase, the organisational framework conditions are created so that what has been learned becomes effective on the organisational development side. This ensures transfer efficiency.

The starting point can also be organisational development. In that case, the concrete development and change needs at organisational level are identified first and the necessary implementation architecture is derived. It is then clarified what qualification needs exist in order to master the specific organisational challenges successfully.

If a personal development need becomes apparent, a corresponding qualification architecture is designed and implemented. In this case, the implementation architecture of organisational development sets the pace for people development.

In both cases, no knowledge is built up in reserve. Leadership development takes place in a precisely fitting and tailored way, matched in each case to the organisational challenges.

An essential component of the learning architecture is the central learning platform. It enables a team to take up learning offerings independently of time, place and device.

The learning platform allows web-based self-study that follows the perceived learning need and takes place at an individual pace. Outside the often tight time slots of training seminars or workshops, employees find the freedom to acquire and practise competencies, along the lines of their current professional challenges.

The programme is based on the assumption that lasting learning success is closely linked to the degree of self-determination in the learning process. In neurobiology, learning gains are described as neuroplastic changes in the brain. According to this assumption, learning gains are greater when learners explore the subject matter themselves and look for solutions independently. It also helps when learning content is presented in varied ways and can be explored along individual learning paths.

Self-directed learning on a learning platform works with various digital learning materials. These include e-learning courses, learning videos, simulations and interactive knowledge databases. The programme expects this to deliver high efficiency, beyond the economic perspective.

At the same time, the programme assumes that personal and self-directed learning processes often remain ineffective if they are not linked to organisational challenges. For this reason, the continuous evaluation of and reflection on learning processes are of considerable importance.

Learning management systems enable continuous usage evaluation and automated learning progress checks. Employees receive clear feedback and a structure for their individual learning progress. People development receives clear feedback on the acceptance of the existing learning offerings and can adapt them continuously.

Learning on a learning platform mostly takes place asynchronously. Digital communication channels do support exchange in and about the learning process. Nevertheless, regular reflection for a shared assessment of position is needed to ensure the effectiveness of the learning processes and to make what has been learned effective for the organisation. In-person sessions and personal exchange among employees remain a suitable method for this.

Asynchronous self-study with the platform’s various learning media changes the role of on-site sessions. In conventional training measures, more time remains for reflection, evaluation, constructive discussion and decisions.

Participants can prepare for the workshops on the platform through targeted use of relevant learning content and deepen their content afterwards in the same way. In-person sessions can therefore focus more on communicative settings and methods with which individual and collective development is reflected on and evaluated.

These sessions therefore serve above all to bring the different learning experiences into the organisation and to improve the learning processes. However, the learning architecture also requires necessary organisational changes to be discussed. Only this makes it possible to transfer the competencies learned into operational business.

Blended learning refers to the didactically meaningful combination of traditional in-person sessions with modern forms of web-based learning on the platform. It combines the effectiveness and flexibility of electronic forms of learning with the social aspects of face-to-face communication and with the practical training of competencies and activities.

The design aims to strengthen the advantages of different media and methods and reduce their disadvantages through a suitable combination. It is particularly important that the in-person phases and the self-directed online learning phases are functionally coordinated with one another.

The learning architecture combines asynchronous learning phases on the platform with shared reflection on the different learning processes in in-person sessions. This creates the conditions for interlinking learning goals and operational tasks.

Within the conceptual learning architecture, an effective interlinking of organisational development and people development thus takes place in a continuous, two-way development process. It enables efficient and synchronous further development at both levels.

This brings us full circle to the starting point. According to the concept, the new requirements for leadership can only be addressed if the development of the individual leader and the development of the organisation are thought of together. The learning platform provides the flexibility for this, the evaluation the feedback, and the in-person session the place for shared reflection and decision.