The last three years have posed serious challenges for leadership. The inability of many leaders to rise to the occasion revealed that the talent crisis organizations thought they had before the pandemic is worse than they imagined.
It Takes Versatility to Lead in a Volatile World
Versatile leaders are effective at helping their organizations regroup, refocus, and continue to produce during periods of volatility.
March 07, 2023
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Summary.
Data collected since the first year of the pandemic has shown that versatility is an even stronger component of effective leadership now than it was before. The correlations between versatility and a variety of leadership outcomes — employee engagement, team agility, business unit productivity, and overall effectiveness — have only gotten stronger. Using a 360 tool called the Leadership Versatility Index, the authors have studied versatile leadership for 26 years. The most effective leaders not only operate to their strengths, but deftly toggle between opposing, yet complementary behaviors. They note that versatility is therefore not just another leadership competency, but a meta-competency; it reflects a balanced and well-rounded pattern of competencies that suggests an underlying capacity to master specific skills and behaviors and enable the continual learning of new ones. In this article, the authors outline their research, and illustrate what truly versatile leadership looks like and how it’s developed.