Leadership Trends for 2023

Stephanie Neal defines three leadership trends for 2023: Get Ahead of Burnout, Confront the Trust Crisis and Lead Virtual and Remote Teams Effectively (Neal, Stephanie 2022).

How do these trends impact the working practices in your workplace?

I have a colleague who is returning to work after a burnout, and the effects are still visible. Burnout prevention is important, and steps to minimize risks are taken.  The impact should be that leaders communicate and are aware of the stress that employees have, this can be seen in meaningful communication between workers. As mentioned in the A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers, steps to reduce social isolation should be made to increase workers well-being.  (Larson ,Barbara, Vroman, Susan & Makarius Erin 2020). Also leaders should focus on themselves to alleviate stress, as it can manifest as lack of productivity and rumination, this further increases the possibility of a burnout. (What Drives Leadership Stress — and How to Deal 2023.)  This would manifest as a training for employees and leaders to recognize stress and take preventive steps.

Building trust between the workforce and leaders is important as only 46% of the people does trust the leaders, says 2023 Global Leadership Forecast (Neal, Stephanie 2022). The leaders should start to create safe environments for people to feel comfortable, and able to express their opinions and take risks. Also transparency is key: Tell your workers openly what is going on in the firm (Lewis , Abbey 2022). This should result in more open communication from our management in our meetings.

In my current job most of my communication is done virtually, and as such virtual leadership is important. Most of the steps described in A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers are already taken. We have short daily meetings in order to see if any problems has arisen, social meeting is set in calendar for every day named “virtual café” for non-work related chat and other message pathways to reach colleagues if urgent matter is at hand.(Larson ,Barbara, Vroman, Susan & Makarius Erin 2020). I feel like my company has mastered this part, as an IT firm it needs to have robust communication through virtual teams. One thing that this sift might bring is an introduction protocol for new team leads so they can catch up in the correct way to hold virtual meetings.

How do these trends impact the required managerial and leadership skills in your work and your workplace?

Burnout prevention requires leaders to be able to recognize employee stress beforehand and take actions. This might show up as more person focused training in which leaders learn how to spot and care burnout. For employees this might show up as more check ups from leaders on how they are managing.

Trust building might show up more as open communication, and delivering more information about company to employees. We might get more negative status notifications about company from leaders, but this will build trust in the long term as then employees will not thing that company is hiding things from them.

Summary

As year 2021, will the year 2023 be different for the leaders. More focus on the people must be made, so that they will feel connected to the workplace. Leaders must adapt to virtual teams and find ways to communicate efficiently to report the company status and keep up how personnel is coping.