Productive Leadership into the Third Decade of the 21st Century

Lead image courtesy of Rebrand Cities on Pexels.

A leader is a person who has the ability to influence the behavior of his team to generate a certain result.

And what do we understand by productivity? Productivity consists of “generating more with less”; it is inversely proportional to what is generated vs. the resource you require to generate it.

What Makes You a Productive Leader?

A productive leader states very clearly and forcefully:

1) Your Objectives

Answer these 4 questions:

• What do I want to achieve?
• Why I want to achieve it?
• How am I going to achieve it?
• How am I going to measure it?

The sales leader of a company, for example, must be clear that they want to achieve a certain number of sales because that generates abundance for both the company and its collaborators and the customer.

Likewise, it must be achieved through a previously defined commercial method and measured by the number of pieces sold in a given time from the beginning.

2) Control of the Operation.

The “mother” of productivity controls. A leader has to control the resources, the times, the inventories, the execution of their people, the unforeseen.

The word control is very important for a leader who wants to generate a concrete result. Control plays a critical role in being productive.

More Productivity-Oriented Personal Characteristics

There are four characteristics that typically characterize or shape people: those that tend to be very expressive and sociable; and those that are very task-oriented.

Two other groups emerge from these two large groups: those that are highly communication-oriented; and, on the contrary, those that, rather, are usually not very communicative.

Of all of them, those who tend to be more focused on productivity are those who are task-oriented. Some know them as the “push” and analytical people, but they are people who, due to their personality, are highly oriented to achieving results and, therefore, to productivity.

Productivity Today and in the Future

In the framework of the 21st century, I believe that we are going to start seeing productivity as a very marked trend, in the next ten years. It will be determined, to a large extent, by computers and by all technological and digital advancement. In other words, productivity is no longer strictly related to the work of the human being, but basically technological work. In fact, it is said that in the next 15 years we will see 4 days work weeks instead of the traditional 5 days.

Initially, that would seem to be against productivity, but it is not. What happens is that all the routine work that human beings today have to carry out with jobs that are going to disappear because it is the machines that are going to generate them. Another aspect to note is that productivity is no longer going to be associated with a task that you have to monitor with your eyes. In this sense, the leaders of the 20th century were present when their people were working because they wanted to see with their own eyes that they were not doing anything else.

However, the leader of the 21st century is going to face remote work as a constant. Probably 20% are remote and 80% are not. In the coming years we will see how this trend is reversed; most of the jobs are going to be remote and the word control is going to have another nuance, since it will not be linked to physically observing employees all day, to see that they are doing what is expected of them.

Consequently, current and future leaders will have to learn to trust their teams and people and establish very well-defined metrics, since what will let them know that their team is doing well is not observing them, but the team's outcomes and results.

This combination is interesting since it means that leaders will have to evolve along with work tools and new working means. In this sense, I consider that the work environment is going to present a great transformation in the next 20 years.

Previously published here.