Part 3 of 4 - The Top Emerging Competencies for 2021

In Part 1 of our series, we started a discussion on the potential top competencies needed in the new year as businesses and business leaders continue to adapt to the new realities of the post-pandemic world. Part 2 took a further look at one of the most critical competencies of Developing a Strategic Mindset. Today, in Part 3, we introduce a discussion on Defining Integrative Thinking.

Part 3 - Defining Integrative Thinking

Traditional leadership development best practices suggest that if you want to be like the great successful business leaders of our time, all you must do to emulate them is read their biographies, learn about what they did and the decisions they made, and then duplicate and replicate them. You want to create the next “Apple,” read the Steve Jobs biography and be like Steve. You want to be the next Jack Welch and create a General Electric, go the Jack Welch school.

Part 2 - The Top Emerging Competencies for 2021

We recently introduced the Top Emerging Competencies for 2021 and today we will take a deeper dive into the topic of Developing a Strategic Mindset, which will be one of the “hottest” and most important competencies in 2021.

Defining the Strategic Mindset

One of the most important characteristics of highly successful strategic leaders is their ability to see and understand the big picture. They have a global view and can interpret the data and metrics they see using the insights to shape the future through problem solving and taking the right business risks.

Specifically, a strategic mindset is an approach to problem solving and decision making that focuses on the big picture and uses Business Acumen and analysis to understand the impacts of decision in both the short-term and the long term. To develop a strategic mindset, it’s important to identify, understand, and use skills of strategic thinking and financial acumen.

It is that time of the year to start looking forward to trends and predictions for the upcoming year. 2021 is going to another very different environment as businesses and business leaders continue to adapt to the new realities of the post-pandemic world.

For those living in the Talent Development world, one of the more interesting things we are following is the emergence of the competencies needed to thrive and survive in our “new normal.”

During the holiday break, our research team spent time reviewing our own research including surveys and observations of working with thousands of leaders during the year. In addition, we reviewed more than 100 articles, blogs, and white papers from leadership development experts to understand the hot topics and trends. The result of this work is a 4-part blog series that starts with the introduction of all the key competencies and then a focus on the top 3 competencies in practical and usable detail.

My holiday break has already been a great success as a result of an excellent book I just read called, “The Curious Advantage” by authors Paul Ashcroft, Simon Brown, and Garrick Jones.

As a learning professional specializing in developing leadership competencies through the use of experiential digital business simulations, I found this book to be extremely satisfying because it provides thoughtful ideas, insights, and solutions to Talent Development pain points our clients have been experiencing for the past several years.

Curious about Curiosity

In the world of leadership development, everything revolves around competencies. A competency is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. For example,

• having a strategic mindset to make the best business decisions
• possessing an integrative thinking capacity to understand the systems of business
• giving in-the-moment feedback to people you are working with, so they can execute their jobs and tasks flawlessly

Many experts in the field of Leadership Development believe that “being curious” is a behavior or trait, rather than a specific, refined skill. In the world of sports, some believe it’s impossible to teach speed. That is incorrect. You can teach people to be faster by providing frameworks, context, and specific techniques. In the world of leadership development, some believe that it is impossible to teach the competency of curiosity. This entire book successfully counters that belief through very practical tools and examples. The book makes a strong case that one of the most important things leaders can do to develop talent to reach their business goals and objectives is to create a culture of curiosity where employees are encouraged to seek out new ideas and experiment as part of a learning process strategy.

The following blog is an introduction to Advantexe’s free virtual business simulation called “Santa’s Workshop.” Feel free to read the story and then play the simulation! The simulation is designed to introduce learners to the drivers of business acumen in a fun and risk-free environment. 

Way up at the North Pole, the Chief Operating Officer of Santa’s Workshop, Incorporated, a not-for-profit organization that distributes toys to the good kids around the world is struggling with the execution of the organization’s business strategy.

Last July, after a virtual business acumen training session, the CEO (Santa) and the senior leadership team all agreed to shift toward a more Customer-Centric model moving away from Operational Excellence. Customer centricity is a strategy that is focused on the needs of the customers while Operational Excellence is a strategy that is focused on driving costs out of the system to create more efficiencies. As a side note, when Santa first stared the business centuries ago, the strategy was Product Leadership where all the presents made in the workshop were the most innovative on the planet. Over the years, that strategy became unaffordable as the population of the planet grew.