The 17 Principles for New Leadership

New leadership offers several advantages for a company. Firstly, and most importantly, the world has become much more uncertain for companies and managers. Traditional leadership is based on the knowledge and experience of managers. However, this is often useless in completely unknown situations. New Leadership enables effective leadership in the face of great uncertainty. The new leadership approaches help to act safely despite uncertainty and enable co-creative collaboration between people.

This new leadership also offers companies the opportunity to deal openly with megatrends, social transformations and new technologies. These are the fuel for strategic decisions, new opportunities and positive change. New leadership also strengthens employee loyalty to the company, attracts talent, can react more quickly to change and unleash creative power that leads to innovation and makes companies more resilient.

New leadership differs from traditional leadership styles through a new paradigm. Traditional leadership focusses on order, structures, stability and scalability. To achieve this, managers and executives have learnt a comprehensive toolbox and many methods. Always with the aim of achieving a high degree of controllability. New Leadership, however, expands this paradigm. This type of leadership recognises that complexity is increasing and that decisions have to be made in the face of great uncertainty.

New Leadership therefore broadens the spectrum for managers and offers principles, competences and methods to lead effectively even in the face of uncertainty, complexity and dynamics. It is therefore more than a leadership style, it is a new understanding of leadership and requires a new attitude.

New leadership requires new competences, such as creativity, systemic thinking, resilience, emotional intelligence, complex problem solving, active learning and agile collaboration. These competences are the result of a combination of skills, new knowledge, motivation, talent and experience. If you bring along a portion of curiosity and the ability to self-reflect, then you already have New Leadership approaches.

According to our concept, you will not learn these competences in isolation, but in a flow and in the context of your specific challenges.

The principles help you to implement New Leadership in your team. If you know the meaning of New Leadership, then you start to “do things differently and do different things.” You change ways of working, consider the differences between complicated and complex problems, increase your team’s awareness and work together differently. Each principle provides food for thought for reflection and new options for action. We have even developed a card game that you can use when working with your team.

Various challenges can arise when introducing New Leadership. Firstly, new leadership requires certain behaviours to be radically changed. This creates uncertainty – both among managers and teams. In this phase of uncertainty, there is a risk of falling back into old patterns and underestimating the importance of new leadership.

Another challenge is unconscious conditioning and beliefs that are called into question by new principles and working methods. New leadership means, for example, that the manager is no longer the (sole) decision-maker, but that teams are empowered to make decisions with the help of new methods. In addition, tensions often arise because structures, processes or tools still originate from an old work culture and hinder New Work and New Leadership.

Further training in the area of New Leadership can help perfectly. They make the differences between various paradigms clear and provide the necessary knowledge. In addition, training courses enable people to try out new practices, methods, tools and behaviours in a protected environment.

New leadership has a significant impact on employee loyalty and satisfaction. People today want more development and autonomy in their work, room for manoeuvre and self-determined working methods. According to the New Leadership definition, the focus is on people and their strengths and potential – and this promotes development and freedom. This type of leadership creates vibrant cultures in which people like to stay and which in turn attract others.

The New Leadership approach helps managers to recognise the significance of new trends and developments more quickly. They develop a hyper-awareness of the environment and derive opportunities from this. Technological developments such as artificial intelligence, the handling of data and algorithms, virtual or augmented reality also offer new opportunities for the transformation of companies. They change working methods in teams, but require new skills.

In addition, all companies are affected by the massive shift towards sustainable corporate management. Managers therefore need an understanding of the different categories of sustainability, legal obligations and strategic opportunities. However, they also need to develop a working culture that integrates various stakeholders and enables concrete changes by managers and all employees.

New leadership is a concept that requires new skills and competences from managers on the one hand, but also a change in structures on the other. At the macro level, these are new forms of organisation and collaboration (for example, across departments, cross-functional, cross-hierarchical, including external stakeholders), while at the micro level, projects or meetings are conducted differently.

In order to implement the New Leadership approach in the company, people and structures need to work together. This could take place in the following phases:

Preparation (co-creation)

• What challenges do the organisation and managers face?
• What are the goals? What change is desired – and why (purpose)?

Conceptualisation

• Which principles, competences and methods need to be anchored in order to achieve the goals?
• What learning structures and formats are needed?
• What should the timeline look like?
• Are there pilot teams?

Training

• Workshops and training for employees and managers

Mentoring

• Regular reviews in iterative cycles
• Retrospectives: check-ups on successes and challenges
• Adaptation of measures

Organisational development

• Which macro and micro structures prevent agile work?
• Where is communication prevented?
• Where does acting in hierarchies and silos stand in the way of an agile and modern working world 4.0?

Anchoring

• Expansion of the measures to other areas of the company
• Building a new leadership community
• Self-organised events for joint learning and working (e.g. open spaces)

We offer specific further education and training programmes on the topic of new leadership. We have developed a 12-day programme that covers all aspects of new leadership and can be adapted to suit your company.

However, most of the programmes we develop for our clients are tailor-made. After a joint co-creation, we create a concept that addresses the specific challenges and conveys the necessary principles and competences. These programmes vary in length: from 4 days to 13 days over a period of 0.5 – 1.5 years.

The content and formats of our New Leadership training courses are organised according to the 4 domains: Leading yourself, leading others, leading business and leading beyond. Our work is fundamentally experience-based. This means that you get to know new approaches, concepts, working methods etc., but then try them out straight away. We support peer learning

All of the trainers in our team have extensive experience in designing and supporting transformation processes, have all completed in-depth external coaching and/or trainer training and have also taken part in our internal train-the-trainer programmes. In addition, each of them has individual knowledge and experience on topics such as AI, futures design, sustainability, innovation, etc.