3 Skill Areas Leaders Need During Covid-19

Three critical foundational skills worth expanding on for leadership success

To successfully emerge from the COVID pandemic, leaders will need to nurture their employee's adaptability and resilience skill sets, in addition to their social and emotional skill sets. 

The revolutions in technology, business models, and consumer preferences affected the global workforce—forcing leaders to shift their operations while fundamentally reimagining business models and strategies. But leaders don't have anything to fear. Leadership Development trends indicate that companies will continue to have an abundance of leadership opportunities in the coming years. As long as companies employ humans, leadership will remain crucial in supporting continued business growth and boosting employee engagement. 

With companies facing a shortage of leadership talent, trends indicate the rising importance of skilling. In fact, in the past two years, surveys showed that companies increased spending on leadership development by more than 170%. For me, this implies that, in the coming years, spending may increase even more as companies address the skills gap resulting from technology in the workplace. 

A Deloitte study found that 63% of millennials workers feel that their employers do not fully develop their leadership skills. According to Brandon Hall, I highlight millennials because 48% of the workforce will be millennials by 2020. 

With this evident leadership gap, companies are focused on bridging their organization's leadership development skills strategies. 

I've gathered three top leadership skill areas to help leaders and managers prepare themselves for the workforce COVID-19. . Comparably, companies can use these skills to ensure that their management training aligns with their learning and development strategies.

1. Expand cognitive skills for reskilling and innovation

In a technology-driven age, the new landscape poses challenges requiring enhanced creativity, innovation, and problem-solving skills. With the workforce remote, it has necessary leaders to demonstrate these skills in an increasingly autonomous environment. What skills will a leader now need to help lead and maintain seamless engagement with their organization's ecosystem? Clients? Partners? Suppliers? An ability to lead significant projects remotely? 

2. Strengthen emotional and social skills to ensure effective self-expression, collaboration, and leadership.

An HR Technologist report cites that 69% of managers are not comfortable communicating with employees. As a result, employees feel the communication divide has profound business implications, including confusion for the company clients or customers (60%) and business (31%). Despite distances, sustaining strong professional ties, creating and developing client relationships, supporting employees remotely, and driving change, leaders need advanced interpersonal and communication skills, including awareness. For instance, in the "remote workforce," a retail relationship banker will have to cultivate emotional and social skills to develop—on a remote basis—the relationship he used to nurture in person. 

3. Build resilience and adaptability to thrive during aftershocks COVID-19 and beyond

As a learning source, today's new experiences are critical for leaders to build self-awareness, self-reliance, and self-confidence. Other areas to reinforce resilience include developing their ability to manage time, mental wellness, and boundaries. For instance, as a result of automation, bank tellers will need more education. As technology replaces routine tasks, the tasks left for people to complete are more complex and require more training and education. For routine-cognitive careers like bank telling, recessions in the economy accelerate the demand for more education, skills, and experience.

In conclusion, leaders must equip themselves to adapt, innovate, and operate remotely. Development strategies that focus on emotional and social skills, cognitive, digital, resilience, and adaptive skills are fundamental skills and should be considered an investment to their success.