Future Skills - Leadership & Talent Development For The Future

Hi There,

So how do you train your leaders and talents best for the future?

As training has become easier it has also become passive (less interactive) and outdated (not future-proofed). What you must do is combine these two – interactivity & future-proofing – in programs focusing on Future Skills, whether that be in the classroom or online.

Future Skills. These are the skills your people need to be successful in the future – tomorrow and the years after. They include current or future topics trained & practiced to match their future work contexts, tasks & situations.

For example, coaching is not new, but it is amazing to see the journey it has taken until now. In future, it needs to meet the expectations of short-term planning, increased complexity, the gig economy & employee expectations to sustainability, empowerment & well-being.

Coaching is often trained as a skill, but train it as a future skill – putting coaching skills into new challenging cases & your real, future work contexts. This will challenge and develop your people personally and professionally – so they are ready to succeed in the future.

Training Future Skills

We use this model to help us design and plan programs for interpersonal skills training of leaders and talents:

Current work context/Current topics: Backbone leadership development.

Current work context/Future topics: Innovative leadership development. Future work context/Current topics: Perspective leadership development

Future work context/Future topics: Foresight leadership development

Current topics: are those we already know well from leadership courses e.g. coaching, energizing, negotiation, communication.

Future topics: are those we expect to be more important going forward e.g. leading remotely, train-the-trainer, mental wellbeing, utilising data insights.

Current work contexts: are those we recognise e.g. in known situations, with a consistent employee group, long-life strategy etc.

Future work contexts: are those we expect to be prevalent going forward e.g. online, diverse employee groups, gig-economy, early empowerment etc.

This leads us to design leadership and talent programs to suit the transition toward Future Skills – moving further than only from Backbone to Innovative leadership development.

New programs must boldly focus on Perspective and Foresight leadership development – otherwise the impact will just not hit the mark!