What are the essential Leadership skills in 2030 ? (Part 2)

If you didn’t read the first part of this post, you can find it here.

I came across a great blog post about what Leadership will be in 2030. The author was looking at a time window of 10 years and his assumption is that businesses will be different as time goes by and the effective leader in 2030 needs to have a few characteristics/skills besides setting a vision and executing on strategy. He also defined a list of skills: (a) Coach; (b) Futurist; (c)Technology Teenager; (d) Translator; and (e) Yoda. In this post I will actually focus on the “Technology Teenager” only.

Technology Teenager: Probably when you hear this term at least one teenager that you know will come to mind. People have many different interpretations of what a technology teenager is, and that is why I created the spectrum below to make it a little clearer. On the one extreme, on the right side (in orange), you can find the technology teenager and some examples of their behaviors. On left hand side (in blue), the other extreme in which I call the technology averse person.

Both sides offer interesting and relevant aspects and behaviors and they are not necessarily conflicting. A good leader can be, at different times, on different sides of this spectrum. However, just like in every spectrum, the extremes are dangerous! On the orange extreme, one of the biggest threats is to let yourself be consumed by technology to the point your life is the technology that surrounds you. This is not healthy and I am pretty sure there are “technology teenagers” out there at this extreme. On the other hand, leaders can not shy away from technology and the biggest threat on the other extreme (in blue) is all the things that you will miss out as a user of technology.

The more technology you have contact with, even if it is just to try it out, the more you will develop a good sense for what is a good product, what is a good UX, how responsive the product feels and so on. It is hard to lead the development of a mobile app if you are not a hard user of mobile apps. It is difficult to manage software teams developing games if you have never played any game. It is hard to manage voice recognition projects, if you are not familiar with how those devices work as a user. It is hard to have a good feeling for what features your team should build for a new streaming service, if you are not using things like that. But all of this is of course only true from the perspective of being a user of technology.

Another aspect of a good technology teenager leader is the interest to understand deeper levels of technology and understand how things are actually working behind the scenes. You don’t need to understand, for example, how twitter works behind the scenes. in order to use twitter. The technology teenager leader, however, will dig deeper on the technical aspects to at least have a high-level understanding of how it works. Identify what are the relevant technologies for you as a leader, and dig deeper! Be curious, keep learning.

Great leaders are be able to navigate this spectrum and find a good ratio for every phase of their careers . Remember, extremes are dangerous, find your balance.