This document outlines six principles for effective leadership in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) business environments: 1. Be a strategist who can shape the future by anticipating trends, contexts, and customer expectations. 2. Be an executor who can get things done through agility, collaboration, decision-making, and accountability. 3. Be a talent manager who can engage today's talent by building competence, commitment, and contribution. 4. Be a human capital developer who can build the next generation of talent differently than the present workforce. 5. Be personally proficient by investing in oneself and building personal authenticity. 6. Develop a personal brand that

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Principle 1: Be a strategist who can shape
the future
Leaders who are strategists think about what’s next, even beyond
what customers today know and want. In VUCA worlds, leaders
as strategists seek more market influence than market share. To
influence markets, leaders need to know and anticipate external contexts (eg,
social, technological, economic, political, and demographic global trends). They
also need to know and anticipate customer expectations by co-creating with
customers rather than listening or responding to them. When leaders know
and anticipate contexts and stakeholders, they build a cross-cultural and global
mindset where they are more open to flexibility and change. They are also able
to focus strategies so they can make key strategic choices and allocate resources
against those choices.
An Asian Consumer Electronics firm managed the global versus local trade
off by shifting design of all leadership development solutions from headquarters
to having multi-cultural teams from different regions responsible for future
programs to better suit the needs of a local audiences. At the same time the
firm also instituted a “One Global Passport” philosophy stating that leadership
competencies and values, technical competence and English language skills
would define people’s potential, irrespective of nationality.
Principle 4: Be a human capital developer
who can build next-generation talent
Ultimately, the best leaders replace themselves with future
leaders not like themselves. Like good parents who invest
in helping their children become who their children hope
to become, not who the parents want them to become. The knack of
workforce planning for the future requires envisioning a future workforce
different from the present. Brick-and-mortar stores are learning that
Internet shopping will require sourcing talent for a future business
requirement. Finding future employees among today’s workforce comes
from empowering employees to discover which employees can adapt
and learn in a new setting. Shaping careers that move horizontally as well
as vertically and that measure success by influence more than position
becomes relevant as well.
Wise leaders say that ‘leaders are judged by what they leave behind.’
In other words how well the organisation survives and thrives once the
inspirational leader leaves. Is the next generation of leaders in place? Have
they been developed, challenged, stretched and empowered? Many Asian
private-owned enterprises face these succession challenges as great individual
leaders must establish thoughtful leadership.
Principle 2: Be an executor who can get things done
Strategy without execution is fantasy. Execution without strategy is misguided.
Leaders who are executors in VUCA worlds change and adapt quickly, face and
boldly make decisions, and increase transparency.
These leaders learn to collaborate with those who are
different from them so that they can learn and adapt.
These leaders also have explicit and timely accountability where they hold themselves and
others responsible for success and failure. These execution traits are important for a VUCA
world where agility is as important as aspiration, where action counts more than vision, and
where processes are as valued as protocols.
Many Asian leaders are admired for their world-class ability to execute. But, the challenge
of sustained execution is to shift from execution through coercive or paternalistic leaders
who control the execution to shared leadership where employees execute because of shared
commitment. A traditional Asian conglomerate gained increases in productivity of 7% and
accelerated innovation and globalisation by making social collaboration tools available. These
social collaboration tools enable execution by sharing information that shapes action without
coercion. In less than one year over 30,000 employees were leveraging these tools to change
the way they worked and collaborated without any official orders to do so.
Principle 3: Be a talent manager who can engage
today’s talent
In study after study, leaders have to leverage themselves through the talent
they guide. As suggested, the traditional leadership models from the top
down are about command and control, where leaders set direction and others act
on it. In a VUCA world, leaders have to coach, communicate, and collaborate so that
employees are connected to the business goals because of the leader, but not through
the leader. These leaders shift from management by objectives to management by
shared mindset. When leaders manage talent, they increase productivity through three
processes: competence, commitment, and contribution. By building competence,
leaders identify future technical and social skills to succeed. By ensuring commitment,
leaders create an employee value proposition that captures employee engagement. By
generating contribution, leaders help employees find meaning and purpose from their
work. When competence, commitment, and contribution are managed well, productivity
follows, multiple generations of employees work together, and talent is embedded
throughout the organisation.
Asian leaders have to continue to think about future competencies, to find ways to
engage employees, and to retain the best employees by helping employees find personal
purpose from their work. In our book The Why of Work, we summarise seven principles for
leaders to become meaning makers.

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Principle 6: Develop a personal brand that
represents the firm’s brand
Ultimately, the test of a leader inside a company is the extent to which his
or her personal behaviours create value for those outside the company. We
call this having a Leadership Brand. It begins by leaders understanding firm
brand or identity in the marketplace, or what your organisation is known
for by those who use the services. When those external expectations translate
to leadership actions, the leader’s personal brand reflects the goals of the organisation.
At CapitaLand, leaders inside the company are working to ensure that their actions are
consistent with customer expectations. They have programmes within CLIMB (CapitaLand
Institute of Management & Business) that focus on “building people” to be better leaders
and contributors in a way that is consistent with their main business of real estate and
hospitality. The Institute Leader, Lee Tiong Peng is also a leader who “lives the brand” with
an open leadership philosophy and gently coaches his staff and encourages collaboration
and sharing within the global CapitaLand Learning team.
Conclusion
Developing excellence in these six areas above as well as increasing your cross-cultural
competence, global mindset, and leveraging social media as a key enabler, will help you
empower your employees, grow your business and win in a more sustainable manner, no
matter how volatile, uncertain, complex or ambiguous the environment.
Our leadership time traveller would recognise the six basic principles of effective
leadership, but would also realise that their application would have to be dramatically
different to adapt to VUCA business conditions. By adapting these principles, leaders can
shift from amateurs who are overwhelmed with the pace of business to professionals who
anticipate, respond, and succeed.
Principle 5: Be personally proficient to invest in
yourself and to build your personal authenticity
Leadership oracles wisely state that all change has to be personal change,
that leading others has to start with leading oneself, and that leaders must
be the change they hope to see in others. Terms like emotional intelligence,
people quotient, or self awareness highlight the focus on leaders who know
themselves so that they can lead others. We have summarised these personal insights into
five areas, which we consider the Olympics of leadership:
Leaders who demonstrate these five personal attributes will be personally proficient and
able to respond to VUCA business conditions. They will not be overcome by the demands
of change, but relish the opportunities in change.
MB Shin, the previous CEO of LG Electronics India, was greatly admired by his local
team, promoted a number of Indians into positions of authority, was voted “Electronics
Industry Man of the Year” and was loved by spouses and kids of the employees for the
Summer Camp he personally and enthusiastically sponsored every year. He represented
what he wanted others to become.