2024.10.17

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It’s time for part 3 of our Elements of Exceptional Modern Leadership series. In this installment we’re highlighting skillsets that we believe will become the norm for leaders over the next 10 years … but either aren’t yet well-known or aren’t widespread in practice.

If you start developing these skills now, you’ll be well ahead of the curve and will exemplify exceptional modern leadership in your workday.

Read part 1 on leadership essentials. Read part 2 on contemporary leadership fundamentals.

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5 Exceptional Modern Leadership Skills for the Future

1. Systems- and Perspectives-Based Approach

The truly excellent leaders of tomorrow have adopted a systems- and perspectives-approach to their own synthesis of information, forecasting, and decision-making, and are helping their organizations do the same. Understanding, appreciating, and integrating collective wisdom, competing perspectives, knowledge of micro and macro systems and other holistic and distributed ways of knowing and functioning will be a requirement for exceptional leaders in the future.

2. Purpose and Legacy

While some leaders have always thought about the purpose and legacy of their work, the highly effective leaders of today and tomorrow keep it front and center and use it as a guiding star for all decisions. Currently, too many leaders are focused only on achieving next-quarter’s results without any eye to the consequences that will be born in the intermediate term, let alone the long run – by the organization, their team, and their own inner peace. Exceptional modern leadership requires a renegotiation of one’s relationship to one’s own work and a responsibility for whatever legacy is created. It’s more than career satisfaction or pride – it’s existentially important.

3. Embodied Leadership and Authentic Presence

Embodied Leadership is a way of leading that integrates and draws from your intellect, emotional intelligence, and somatic experience. All three are equally important and help you leverage an awareness of the feedback loop between your inner experiences (e.g., thoughts, feelings, beliefs), physical movements and posture, breath, voice, and behaviors (e.g., words and actions). An embodied leadership approach can help keep you true to yourself, while deeply understanding what is going on with others around you. It is also a fundamental concept that underpins authentic, executive presence.

4. Intuitive Intelligence

Intuitive intelligence is the ability to reliably recognize intuitive signals and be aware of any meaning inferred from them. Everyone has an intuition. Some people ignore it completely and some have accessed it fluently all their lives. The best leaders understand the strengths and limitations of using intuition in decision making, have honed their own abilities, and leverage it as a tactical tool.

5. Personal Energy Awareness

Finally, exceptional modern leaders understand that they have a personal energy field and embrace working with it to consciously co-create their world and lead and thrive within it. Ancient wisdom traditions have known about personal energy fields for thousands of years. Discoveries in quantum physics have confirmed much of this knowledge. It is now indisputable that we are made of energy and that the particles that comprise us are connected outside our current scientific understanding of space and time (e.g., entanglement) and often behave as waves of possibility instead of observed particles. Learning what this means on a practical level, for daily work and life, is crucial for the effective leaders of tomorrow.

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Burnout and the Future of Leadership

With proficiency in these areas comes a nuanced ability to detect even subtle drains on one’s energy. Leaders take in that information about themselves and make adjustments accordingly.

Burnout is a thing of the past, even for high-achieving, mission-driven leaders.

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Your Next Actions

We’ve outlined five areas we believe to be important for the exceptional leaders of tomorrow.

1. Which of the areas are you most interested in developing?

2. What is one concrete action step you will take this week?

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This concludes our introductory series on Elements of Exceptional Modern Leadership.

If you found value in this content, please do us a favor and share this post with your network or favorite high-ambition, mission-driven millennial or gen z leader.

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