VUCA Leadership: How to Lead through Hard Times

Lead | By | | 3 minutes of reading

VUCA Leadership is about leading when you don’t have all the answers. The Covid-19 Pandemic has shown us how unready many of our world leaders are. Everyone knows that we live in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world, but they blamed each other as it doing so will solve the problem.

Of course, we can talk about being resilient and having the ability to bounce forward in the new normal. But the new normal is also a VUCA World. Unless leaders develop new skills, more people will suffer.

Wherever you are now in your leadership, may this piece help you prepare yourself for the next big step.

7 Leadership Challenges in a VUCA World

Many leaders fail in two areas: appreciation and engagement. In many organizations, the blame for the inability to get things done almost always falls on the employees.

Managers get motivational speakers because they hope they can cure employee productivity and performance problems.

Companies rise and fall on leadership.

You can make a great impact if you are responsible for building and developing leaders in your organization.

And if you are like my clients, you want to find out how a leadership speaker, coach, or mentor can help you address some of the challenges that leaders face nowadays.

Even the most influential leaders face any of these seven challenges:

  • Leaders must become effective managers. Leaders are looking for someone who can help them develop skills like time management, prioritization, strategic thinking, systems thinking, decision-making, and getting the jobs done to be more effective at work.
  • Leaders must inspire the heroes of their organizations. Everywhere I go, leaders look for the simplest and most effective ways to inspire and motivate others.
  • Leaders must enable every employee to deliver better and smarter. They must also find ways to engage employees and give them overwhelming reasons to stay. They can’t just get another motivational speaker. They must inspire and motivate every working day.
  • Leaders must build high-performing teams. Team building, team development, and team management are crucial roles of leaders. They must learn how to inspire team pride and clear the path so each member becomes successful. They must lead small teams effectively. They must lead big teams effectively too.
  • Leaders must initiate, lead, and sustain changes in the organization. They must communicate the importance of change. Turn those with high leadership potentials into champions and address the concerns of resisters. Finally, they must mitigate change consequences and overcome resistance to change.
  • Leaders must develop the ability to influence others. Engagement drives results. They must create stories that resonate and communicate an inspiring vision.
  • Leaders must develop the disciplines of execution. To drive results that matter, leaders must learn to help everyone develop the ability to actualize wildly important goals in daily actions.

Organizations exist in a VUCA world (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous). Therefore, leaders must manage, mobilize, lead, and deal with change.

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