Why Business Leadership Matters: The Changing Global Context

In a contemporary business landscape marked by technological disruption and rapid change, industry leaders play an increasingly important role in fostering continued growth. The Leading Sustainability: High Impact Leadership online short course from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) aims to equip you with the capabilities to lead your business into the future. 

Transcript

Businesses really need leadership to enable them to change, to adapt, to evolve to a really rapidly changing, challenging context. But they also need leadership to enable them to go beyond just reacting, but to be able to be proactive, to really shape that context, to find ways to deliver long-term commercial performance and to do that through meeting society’s needs and through responding to society’s expectations. 

When we look at the context for business today, and we look at the trends that are going to be shaping businesses in the future, we really need to look beyond the immediate market forces. We need to look at the macro trends that are really going to be shaping the way that we live, the way that we work, the way we consume, and eat, and communicate, and socialise, and travel, so we need to look at all of those forces that are going to be shaping the societies and the economies that businesses are serving. 

So, that requires us to look at forces such as the really rapid advances in technology. So we know that technological advances are really rapidly redefining the way that we live and work.

But it’s also increasingly important that businesses look at the pressing environmental trends that are shaping and affecting the societies and economies that they work in. And importantly, it’s no longer enough for businesses to look at these trends just through the lens of thinking about risk management and optimising commercial opportunity so that they can maximise shareholder returns. So society’s increasingly expecting more from business. They’re expecting business to be part of a solution to these challenges that they’re facing.

It’s clear that the kind of leadership that’s been developed and rewarded in the past, both within business schools and also within our education systems, actually is not, is not equipping businesses with the capabilities that they need to lead into the future. 

And if I highlight the key challenges, leadership challenges, that we see organisations facing, they start with having leaders that can understand the global trends, really understand the context, think in systems, be able to navigate that complexity, to be able to identify priority areas of focus, leverage points, intervention points within that system.

Secondly, there’s an important challenge that they face in translating that big picture thinking and bringing it down to a practical level that their colleagues, their peers, people in their teams, can really understand, that can help shape their day-to-day actions, their, their practical, you know, action plans and strategies so that they can take action and know they’re making progress.

Another is the ability to innovate, and to innovate right across the organisation. Whether it’s at the processes and systems, whether it’s core products and services, or even more fundamentally, at the level of the business model, companies are recognising they need to foster a culture of innovation. 

And then there’s the importance of being able to collaborate, to be effective in influencing and engaging people across silos, across the organisation, beyond the organisation. Beyond the transactional relationship, when you need to get people to come together and work towards a common goal, actually, people have not been equipped with the kinds of capabilities they need to build those trust-based relationships.

And then there’s the ability to be able to be really powerful communicators. To be able to engage through storytelling, to be able to inspire and engage people. Sometimes you really need people to do things that might be challenging, to step into the unknown, to do things in completely different ways.

So we need leaders that will really hold themselves personally accountable for their impact and their results. But it’s that ultimate commitment to impact that we really need and want from leaders of the future.