The successful organisation of the future will be staffed by employees adept at collaboration, communication, empathy and cognitive flexibility – they will be emotionally intelligent and resilient.  In an uber competitive, technologically automated future, the successful workforce will be highly aligned, engaged, agile, inclusive and at its core, able to leverage diverse thinking and collective intelligence to navigate the challenges that organisations will face.

No longer will organisations be able to rely on skills such as vertical decision making and linear problem solving, nor on single disciplinary experts (usually male, white, middle aged and with a ‘left-brain’ mechanical approach to the world) to unilaterally direct organisations into the future.

More than we can imagine, successful organisations will be filled with employees who can:

1. Create positive customer experiences;
2. Learn fast;
3. Adapt quickly so as to take advantage of market opportunities or to mitigate threats.

The ability to create positive customer experiences; to be adaptable and flexible and; to learn fast – this is the blue-print of the skills-profile organisations should be building now.

We can break down these three domains into sub-skills – collaboration, empathy, communication, agility, inclusiveness, resilience and emotional intelligence.  Add to this list, a fierce commitment to accountability, to ‘getting it done’ and we start to see how difficult it is to build the skills-profile needed for organisations to flourish.

And it doesn’t end here: There is a dearth of leaders who can cultivate this skills-profile across the employee-body, that appreciate what’s at stake.  Not only is today’s competent leader responsible for ‘building capability’, building the workforce skills which allows a business to deliver on its value promise to the market, this same leader must devote the majority of their time to forging a connection with employees, to nurturing ‘alignment’ to the organisation’s purpose so as to unify employees and drive their efforts. This leader must be able to define, disseminate and embed the organisation’s purpose (mission) and champion it as the lens through which the organisation evaluates everything it does.

To read the skills that organisations need to be building now, follow the link: Skills for the Future VF