3 Ways to Build a Culture Where Everyone Is A Leader

Deloitte University Press released a white paper on the ‘on demand’ workforce of the future.

The article states that:

More than one-third (34 percent) of all workers in the United States are contract workers, and more than half (51 percent) of our respondents say their need for contingent workers will keep growing over the next three to five years.

If the future workplace is shifting towards contract work – what does that mean about the skills that are needed or how people are going to work together the most effectively?

The answer is building a culture where everyone is a leader. How? Here are 3 Ways to Build a Culture Where Everyone Is a Leader:

#1. – Provide leadership training and development to every employee – imagine if your employees had mastery level of core leadership skills such as critical decision making, negotiation skills, innovation and design skills, understanding personality styles, emotional intelligence and more. How would your employee performance be affected?

Leadership development has been saved for those that are being identified as high potential leaders when in reality if everyone had access to leadership skills you would speed up succession planning and you would be able to more quickly identify high potential talent for other opportunities.

#2 – Provide rewards for team leadership – the future of work will of course still have some level of structure and hierarchy however it will evolve into a shared leadership model versus a straight up and down title/power model. Even in holocracy many people mistakenly believe it has no hierarchy or that its a flat system – holocracy has ‘rules’ and ‘modified hierarchy’ that allows for faster decision making, more innovation and team leadership.

The skills of being a leader who can command and control are very different than the mutable skills of a team leadership – its shifting from ‘me to we’. To build a culture where everyone is a leader rewards need to be given to those who are modelling core leadership attributes and evolutionary leadership attributes including helping others succeed, sharing in recognition, celebrating wins as a team and more.

#3 – Build accountability into your expectations of a culture where everyone is a leader. The beautiful aspect of a culture where everyone is a leader is that there is full on personal responsibility required and therefore accountability is the new norm. The future workplace will be a combo of contract workers with full time ‘core’ workers and those teams will need to have the ability to adapt to change quickly, the ability to be accountable to the team and to call out those who are not holding up his or her end of the collective goals.

All of these steps can be taken now, by providing leadership training, rewarding those who display team leadership attributes and building accountability to leadership you are paving the way for a culture where there is full on commitment to results, success and an extraordinary future.

To find out more about the online course “Everyone Is a Leader” go to joineln.com