Recalibrating Leadership with Terence Mauri

What are the most important personality traits and skills we can expect from future leaders to be able to recalibrate leadership in the right direction?

The big story for this year is recalibrating bold leadership. When the future arrives faster than ever before, bold is always less risky than a weak strategy or weak leadership. Bold leaders are defined by future-ready mindsets and skills including the curiosity to learn, the courage to unlearn, the clarity to focus and the conviction to decide. Learning helps leaders evolve and unlearning helps them keep up as the world evolves. The key takeaway is that leaders always overestimate the risk of trying something new and underestimate the risk of standing still.

What is something the leaders of today need to unlearn to become leaders of the future?

I recently got invited to speak at the Nordic Business Forum about why unlearning the always-done ways is a leadership multiplier. Without unlearning, expertise and assumptions quickly
become obsolete, especially as competitive advantage fades faster. Many leaders are also trapped in ‘structural stupidity’ based on six barriers to success that can be reframed as examples of what to unlearn across the enterprise.

• Silo/lack of cross-functional collaboration
• Slow decision making
• Lack of strategic clarity
• Rigid policies
• Formal hierarchies
• Bureaucratic bloat

We pay a high leadership tax every time we forget to unlearn the ‘always done ways’ whether it’s pointless meetings (76% of leaders say most meetings don’t meet their expectations) or we schedule back-to-back Zoom calls with no ‘white space’ in the day for reflecting and refuelling. I hear that success breeds success but I think success can corrupt success too. Without intentional unlearning, it’s difficult for leaders to stay ahead of the speed of change.

If we talk about making the most out of employees’ autonomy, is coaching the correct form of leadership?

Today’s leadership models are broken and the data confirms this. Hack Future Lab’s research shows that:

✔ 1/2 of leaders say they spend more time on ‘shallow work’ than ‘deep work’

✔ 1/3 of leaders are at risk of burnout

✔ 2/3 of leaders say they don’t have enough time in the day to do their job

✔ 2/3 of teams say they are ‘overmanaged’ and ‘under-led’

Coaching over ‘checking’ is a proven way to sharpen the trust and talent agenda for leaders and helps create cultures of curiosity (embrace ideas that challenge the status quo) and reject cultures of conformity (reject ideas that challenge the status quo. What employees want is growth, meaning and opportunity in their work.

Do you think a leader needs to be an employee’s coach in some way? Are leading and coaching the same thing?

Every high-performing team is part of a continuous improvement engine which starts with looking for ‘coachable’ moments in the day. The bad news is that Hack Future Lab’s research shows that only 28% of employees can recall a recent coaching conversation in the last three months. Coaching conversations around strengths, blind spots and skill gaps is a shortcut to inclusive and sustainable leadership that doesn’t just make talent feel good but helps them learn and grow at the speed of the customer. Leaders should move from ‘checking’ and ‘infrequent evaluators’ to continuous coaching conversations that remove barriers to performance and help employees do their best work.

What’s something surprising in your opinion that future leaders should understand? Why?

If there’s one piece of advice for leaders this year it would be to remember that data isn’t the new oil. Attention is the new oil. Attention to context-setting, pace-setting and direction setting. Attention to an eye on the future and making things happen. Hack Future Lab’s research shows that:

✔ 1/3 of meetings are a complete waste of time

✔ 1/3 of leaders say that technology makes the “trivial seem urgent”

✔ 2/3 of leaders say they don’t have enough time in the day to do their job

The Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon said: ‘Too much information leads to a poverty of attention.’ We pay a high leadership tax whenever our attention is hijacked by a pointless meeting or we schedule back-to-back Zoom calls with no ‘white space’ in the day for reflecting and refuelling. Brain research confirms this: when we frequently switch attention from one task to another, we experience an “attention residue” whereby thoughts about the previous task interfere with giving full attention to the current task.

Hack Future Lab’s research highlights that 83% of leaders are drowning in too many priorities, unfocused meetings and over-commitments. This erodes focus and doubles the risk of shallow work (low impact) versus deep work (high impact). A ‘No’ strategy is one of the best forms of optimisation and a powerful way to protect attention and well-being. It’s a clarifier, a simplifier and a multiplier of ROI. Not just return on investment. “Return on Intelligence.”

Is it more effective for upcoming leaders to prioritise adaptability and future goals, or should they concentrate on the present circumstances for better leadership outcomes?

I want to reject the false constraint that it’s either futureoriented or present-focused. Upcoming leaders must learn to be ambidextrous which means performing for today while transforming for tomorrow despite the accelerated phase of cognitive demands and balancing of priorities. The disruptive trends that threaten to upend and reshape every vertical over the next five years — disintermediation in the supply chains, erosion of traditional economies of scale advantages, and more companies dying younger — will only accelerate. Upcoming leaders should ask ‘How do I capitalize on the disruptive forces of the last few years with an eye on the future and a relentless focus on executing for today?’

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