Transforming leaders for the future of work

COVID-19 has not only disrupted entire industries, but we are also witnessing the start of a global transformation in the future of work. These emerging forces are already shaping the post-pandemic generation of employees.

One of the forces that has dramatically accelerated during the pandemic is the pace of digital transformation across organisations, disrupting not just their technological architecture, business models and structures, but the entire world of work.

Next, ensuring the well-being, resilience and relevance of the workforce will need to be a leadership priority as organisations increasingly look beyond productivity to workplace health across

3 main factors: healthy employees, healthy relationships, and healthy work environments, found a recent Gartner study.

The same study noted that during Covid-19, no segment of the workforce was immune from significant and widespread damage to workforce health. Organisations must now figure out how to sustain and grow performance, whether in a period of disruption or not, without damaging the health of employees.

With job disruption set to continue in the new normal and employees having to embrace new ways of working, including hybrid working, organisations must also ensure that employees remain relevant and are future ready. This also means stepping up upskilling and reskilling efforts.

As workflows become comprehensively digitalised, organisations that are more vertical - characterised by commandand-control, functional structures - will increasingly encounter challenges such as silos and hierarchical inefficiencies.

Such organisations will need to look into redesigning their operating structures to drive customer centricity with the right mix of team members across relevant disciplines, all aligned to a common set of metrics, to collectively manage the customer journey and make data-driven, agile decisions.

This has been dubbed by McKinsey as an "unstructuring" process to create "fitter, flatter, faster" organisations. Horizontal organisations are typically flatter, with power shared more broadly among workers, making them more agile in a digital age.

These emerging forces demand a different spirit of leadership - one that enables and inspires human and organisational transformation on a much wider yet deeper level. In practice, this requires engaging broad swathes of people across a horizontal organisation to foster alignment and engagement to drive change and results.

At DBS, we have studied these forces closely even before the pandemic to determine what is needed to build the bank into a world-class institution that stands the test of time.

We studied global iconic companies and realised that beyond strong leadership capability at every level, it is critical to focus on building strong individual leaders, strong teams, and a strong culture. In 2019, we launched our Transformational Leadership master plan, articulating these 5 specific leadership attributes:

• Psychological safety

Organisations that are "fearless" perform better on almost any metric compared to those with lower scores of psychological safety. Research shows that psychological safety is a prerequisite for greater innovation and growth, and also creates highly effective teams.

Organisations that practise humble, curious and empathetic leadership will be able to build a culture where managers have the desire to understand, an inclination to listen and the ability to acknowledge gaps. This enables teams to unleash their full potential in the future of work.

• A growth mindset

A mindset that treats failure or obstacles as a "not yet" signpost - rather than a flat "no" - on a learning curve can harness the power of continuous improvement, said psychologist Carol Dweck. Leaders who foster this growth mindset in employees groom them for a future where automation and machine learning make life-long learning an even more critical trait for humans to remain relevant in the workforce.

• Encouraging a feedback culture

Based on extensive studies by the NeuroLeadership Institute, the most profound way to create a growth mindset is to create a work environment where people trust each other enough to voice concern, disagreement and views. This helps create positive feedback loops, while fostering greater experimentation and productivity. Ultimately, workers benefit from a richness of ideas, which is also vital to organisational resilience.

• Courageous conversations

Courageous conversations and discussions are necessary to enable the identification of real and impactful areas for improvement, so that individuals can grow to their fullest potential and operate at their very best.

For such conversations to take place, a critical precondition is an environment of trust and mutual understanding that there is positive intent between parties. Only then will there be safety to have courageous conversations to enable one another to improve.

• Culture of collaboration

Fostering regular, deliberate collaboration will be even more critical in the horizontal and hybrid work environments of the future. Staying connected through digital channels is easy.

But sharing knowledge freely, learning from each other, working together towards common goals can be more challenging. Some attributes of collaborative teams can be elusive unless the leadership fosters a culture of deep engagement.

Tone from the top

DBS embarked on a 3-year leadership transformation master plan in 2019 with the end goal of creating a more agile, progressive leadership cadre suited to the future of work.

The journey to cultivating 4,000 "Great Managers" started at the top. Our chief executive officer Piyush Gupta sponsored the Transformational Leadership initiative by leading a series of top team leadership effectiveness sprints dubbed "T-Sprints" for "transformational sprints".

These workshops led participants on an experiential journey to internalise the attributes of leadership and our values represented by PRIDE! - purpose-led, relationship-led, innovative, decisive, and E! for "everything fun!".

Leadership transformation is a journey and to sustain progress, while keeping energy and enthusiasm high, we ran a series of follow-up workshops after the initial T-Sprints with very focused interventions to understand how every leader has put into practice what they have learnt.

We also introduced "T-circles" - mentoring circles through social learning - where senior managers lead mentoring conversations with next-generation managers as well as discuss best practices to enable change at wider and deeper levels across the organisation.

Transformational leadership requires deep commitment from the top to jumpstart change, and wide engagement from managerial teams to sustain its impact. Driven by the right values, we believe this can set off a powerful transformation movement that will shape the future of work.

This is a multi-year journey which we will all continue to learn from along the way. We are driven by the belief that building great leaders, great teams and great culture through transformational leadership will be critical to the success of our organisation.

• The writer is managing director and head of group human resource, DBS