The great leaders of the last couple of years have shown extreme fortitude and worked with incredible effort to shore up the business landscape against the worst of the pandemic’s effects.
As tech and digital solutions move to the fore of business operations, business leaders are battling to understand the long term ramifications of a more technically proficient, and digitally reliant, workforce.
Over the last 2 years, this intersection of tech and traditional leadership processes and cultures has become more apparent. Of course, like any seismic shift in leadership methods, there have been ample successes and failures.
Here at Rectec, we see it as part of our mission to help elevate the incredible work tech creators are doing in the recruitment space. But our tech comparison service is only as effective as the leadership team we’re working with.
Our solution’s effectiveness hinges on business leaders’ appreciation and understanding of our tech platform, ATS and recruitment CRM platforms, and how our fast, easy to use comparison services can help HR teams find and import new recruitment tech into their stack. All of which requires a fair bit of tech knowledge…or an open mind and an eager sense of purpose to learn about recruitment tech.
We’ve seen up close how legacy operational management can hinder a company’s recovery post-COVID, and how tech can help return enterprises to growth. So it’s incredibly pertinent that leadership teams understand what cultures of tech leadership will start affecting workflows and impacting operational direction.
As this HBR piece notes, “In most organisations, technical experts who perform well will eventually be asked to lead a team and to deliver results through that team” – in our digital new normal, technical leaders will become the arbiters of enterprise success if, of course, they can apply specific tech leadership lessons into wider teams as they digitally transform.
However, do all leaders need to be as technically proficient as their team? And can established leaders, without the time nor inclination to learn about the plethora of digital tools now available to businesses, still succeed in the modern working environment?
With that in mind, we wanted to explore 3 primary leadership trends within tech in 2022, and how they apply to generalist workplaces.
Enable People.
As tech writer Jeremy Gimble notes in his medium post 5 Things I’ve Learned About Tech Leadership, “your most important job is to be an enabler. Your role is to help the (team) get their jobs done…You don’t have to — and probably won’t — have all the answers no matter how much experience you have. Sometimes, even if you do have the answer, you shouldn’t say so in order to enable your development team to work through the project as well”.
Although specifically referencing a developer team, the premise is the same no matter the industry you work in – humility is your way forward, and enabling your teams is how you build the sort of resilience needed to weather future storms and iterate with consistency.
Show humanity.
Technical innovation is sweeping away long-held assumptions about work, where work should happen, and the ways in which work will be completed.
As Silicon Republic note in their article What skills will future tech leaders need?, “Not every emerging technology will alter the business or social landscape – but some truly do have the potential to disrupt the status quo, alter the way people live and work, and rearrange value pools…give people opportunities and push them with support into new areas, outside the comfort zone – where learning and growth happens.
And be obsessed – in a good way – with how to improve every day”.
Humanity, in this regard, concerns the simple relationship between leaders and developing staff.
No matter the shifts in working expectations, a leader has to be obsessed with personal improvements and has to help staff navigate the changes in our new technical world. It’s about creating cultures of relatable staff support focused on growth which not only helps the enterprise but helps each staff member feel a sense of value and connection to their work.
This sort of humble, human management staff that focuses on development also answers a now perennial complaint of post-COVID management cultures – that of prioritising staff skills L&D.
Conflict resolution is a priority.
Although ostensibly a blog about tech leadership in growth-stage companies, STX Next’s piece A Tech Executive’s Guide for Leading Technical Teams in a Growing Company notes conflict resolution as a top 3 leadership consideration.
When “disruption” is a business and working cultural weather vane, conflict is inevitable. Leaders of modern companies need to be adaptable and agile, yes, but above all else, they need to be able to deal with setbacks, with converse thinking, and with managing disputes.
Despite all the benefits great tech gives us all, leadership is about managing people. And disrupted workplaces, as we’ve all seen over the last 2 years, create stressful working environments, burnout and worse. Leaders need to mitigate conflict excesses (but not get rid of it entirely, as ideas friction generates new ideas) and generate cultures of learning and support.
A quick, responsive process is what you need to attract and engage the best talent.
At Rectec we help organisations to find the best Applicant Tracking System or best Recruitment CRM to suit your needs, accompanied by our unique complementary technology marketplace, to help you build the perfect recruitment tech stack for your business.
You can click here to register for Rectec Compare – and best of all, it’s completely free of charge.