Business organizations and their talent development leaders are still dealing with the long-term impacts of the post-pandemic world where some people remain working remotely and others are back in the office five days a week. If you haven’t noticed, things are very different, and there are many leaders who will say that they are getting worse and not better.
One of the more fascinating leadership challenges of this new normal is that some skills that were previously (before the pandemic) taken for granted are needed more than ever but the problem is not enough people working in an organization know what to do.
Take for example the skill of being able to work across the organization. Pre-pandemic, that meant someone from manufacturing walking over to their colleague in the supply chain, having a brief conversation, together calling up the salesperson to confirm the forecast, and then grabbing a coffee with the distribution team to make sure the orders will be delivered on time the next morning. In our new reality, too many of the people working remotely don’t have strong personal relationships with each other and are not able to get things done in an informal, organic, and productive way that transcends the enterprise.
One of the clients I am working with has engaged Advantexe to build an updated Business Leadership simulation that will teach participants the skills they need to be able to successfully work across the organization. As we have conducted our research to build this solution, I am happy to share some of the base research that will drive the behavior changes resulting from the learning experience.
Based on our research, here are the top three critical skills everyone in the organization needs to be able to successfully work across the organization in our new post-pandemic world:
Strategic Thinking
The first and most important skill is strategic thinking. In this context, strategic thinking means understanding the broader goals of the organization and aligning your work to support long-term business objectives is crucial. This includes things such as assessing risks, identifying opportunities, and prioritizing actions that will have the greatest impact on the company's success in both the short term and long term.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
This involves the ability to work with different departments or teams, such as sales, R&D, marketing, finance, and manufacturing, ensuring smooth communication and cooperation throughout. Being successful at cross-functional collaboration requires understanding different functions' goals and perspectives and finding ways to align them toward a common objective.
Accomplishing this isn’t magic. It takes hard work. In the post-pandemic business world, the only way to build experience is through experience. It will be impossible to have cross-functional collaboration of you have never physically met or worked with other people in other departments.
Communication and Influence
Being able to communicate clearly, both formally and informally, is critical to successfully working across the enterprise. The key to effective leadership and communications is influencing others without direct authority by building relationships, persuading stakeholders, and presenting ideas in a way that resonates with diverse teams and leaders across the organization.
In summary, 2025 is going to be a critical year for skill development, and helping organizations understand how to work across the enterprise is going to be one of the most important of them all.