Why Becoming A Leader Is Becoming More Difficult

As more organisations are looking to reshape their organisational structure to reduce the number of levels between staff and executives to increase agility, communication, and shorten the decision-making process. The advancement of technologies and automation has enabled the organisation to be more sustainable by doing more with less.

There are other challenges that leaders will face such as burnout, employee retention, and role confusion. On top of their normal role, they are expected to coach, delegate, train, provide performance and development feedback, and employee recognition while doing their role.

A huge issue in today’s workforce is the complexity of managing today’s workforce. Here are a few issues that leaders will face.

Increased pace of work

Decrease of hierarchy comes with a diffusion of responsibility; employees will start to operate outside the remit of their normal job description. The introduction of automation, software, and communication tools adds more complexity to the handling of work. The decrease in communication lines and use of automation/technology sets the expectation that work should be quicker. Consequently, employee burnout is more likely.

Hiring and Employee retention

As more individuals become more skilled and qualified but with the employment rate starting to decrease again, talent discovery will become more difficult. Many organisations will resort to poaching employees from other organisations causing retention issues.

Especially during the pandemic, teams became more understaffed due to redundancies or furloughing staff. Managers are under more pressure to maximize their team’s performance and taking extra work themselves to make up for the decreasing resources. With managers and staff taking more roles to keep hitting objectives or keep up with demands, this leads to burnout and more retention issues as workload become unmanageable if this carries on over a long period.

Team Size

As team size increases and with technologies enabling remote working, managers are expected to keep up with employee outreach and communication, which will be difficult if you are already overwhelmed with the workload.

Doing more with less

Leaders will have to maintain the same level of performance or boost team productivity. This often requires a lot of effort to organise or even taking on work themselves. As they take on more work, leaders often have no time to practice management fundamentals like coaching, mentoring, and employee development.

Relationships become interdependent

As employees branch out and take on more work, often they report to other project leads or cross-functional managers. Even though it will take the pressure off their primary manager, there is an increased risk of competing priorities and mixed-messages.  

Summary

Upcoming leaders in today’s workforce will face more extreme challenges that past managers may not have experienced before. With the complexity of the involvement of technology, increase in demand, fewer resources, and less time; managers will need to learn the importance of offloading work, provide high-quality feedback, clarifying expectations, and teach employees how to think for themselves while being more efficient to create more bandwidth.

Organisations will need to listen to their managers and the concerns that they may have on a personal or team level. Often an organisation mindset might be ‘if it’s not broken, no need to invest or change’. Figures on a spreadsheet will not explain the whole story of workloads and resourcing issues as employees are taking on more roles and working more hours to keep up with demand. It is better to communicate with staff that do the work rather than basing change on quantitative data to gain a better understanding of areas of concern.   

Organisations often keep the same workflow structure for years while the culture and demand has changed making the current structure unsuitable for today’s work climate. Investment in project management, training, collaboration platforms, and workstyle assessments will improve efficiency and help leaders to monitor and delegate resources easily.

There is denying that as the world wants instant gratification, the workforce that is responsible for delivering their services quickly will be under pressure to deliver high quality within minutes. Leaders of this generation will need to find ways to work more efficiently and continue to deliver high-quality services while maintaining management responsibilities of employees.  

Are you looking for ways to improving your leadership skills? Check the 15 Ways To Become A Better Leader post.