The Future Leader

11Challenges

Leaders have always been faced with challenges, and that won't change. But what are the most crucial challenges that future leaders will have to know how to overcome over the next decade and beyond? According to the over 140 CEOs I interviewed, these are the greatest challenges that leaders of the future will face:

• Short-term versus long-term thinking
• Leading diverse teams
• Adapting to technology advancements and changes
• Reskilling and upskilling employees
• Keeping up with overall pace of change
• Attracting and retaining talent
• Thinking beyond the business to focus on doing good
• Sticking with what worked in the past
• Making sure the organization stays “human”

I asked the CEOs, “When it comes to leading organizations in the next 10 years, what will be some of the greatest challenges for the leader of the future?” I then listened to the open-ended responses from the CEOs and classified them into various categories; the ones above were the most common responses. These answers were then added into the LinkedIn member survey and respondents had the opportunity to select their top three. You can see how the priority of the challenges differs across seniority levels. Admittedly, however, since the CEO responses were open-ended, they may have simply forgotten to mention a specific challenge or perhaps they assumed that these were already future challenges. Still, I included their responses for comparison. Figure 11.1 shows the top three responses for individual contributors ...