HR Works 87: This Is What Leadership Looks Like in 10 Years

Whether it's failing fast or being agile, leadership has already changed a lot from more traditional approaches. Our guest in this episode brings a lot of expertise surrounding what leadership and the workplace look like today, and what it will look like in 10 years. We are pleased to have Lisa Rueth, the Senior Partner and CEO of Cultivate Leadership, a consulting firm that is dedicated to leadership science, organizational design, and executive coaching. With over 20 years of experience, Lisa has dedicated her career to helping organizations with the mechanics of leadership, human performance, and systems of collaboration. Lisa studied Applied Leadership and Organizational Psychology at the Ken Blanchard School of Business and did graduate work in Authentic Leadership at Naropa University and has a Masters in Social Change, marrying her passion for empowering leaders doing world changing work. Below is a partial transcript of this episode. For the full transcript, click here: https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2019/07/09/hr-works-transcript-this-is-what-leadership-looks-like-in-10-years/ James: Hello, everyone, and welcome to HR Works, the podcast for HR professionals. HR has an important job: predicting the future. The urgency of that job grows with each passing year as various technologies rapidly advance. In a presentation that I recently attended, Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, stated that skills learned today will be obsolete in 5 years. That stunning fact alone well couches the problem at hand. Technology is evolving far too quickly for employees to keep up, and HR is the exception. Today's guest specializes in what the workplace—and, in particular, leadership—will look like in 2025. I'm pleased to introduce Lisa Rueth, the senior partner and CEO of Cultivate Leadership, a consulting firm that is dedicated to leadership science, organizational design, and executive coaching. Lisa: Thank you for having me. What a pleasure and an honor. James: Absolutely. How about we jump right in? There are going to be a lot of changes to the workplace and to leadership over the next 10 years. For example, I see that there's going to be, by some estimates, as many as 800 million jobs lost globally by 2030. That's not that many jobs, right? Lisa: It's a lot. It's a lot. It's even more important to think through how automation will reshape entire industries. Right? It's not just the jobs that we're losing—it's entire industries and people who have particular skills. Like a large majority of some of those industries will be—think of trucking, right? Think of cars. They're autonomous. Think of trains, transportation, and airplanes. So, what we end up with are people. There's an entire category of people who are skilled for hands-on work that we have, over time—over the last 50 years, become more and more accustomed to outsourcing to other workers around a globalized marketplace. So, losing jobs is a problem within itself, but losing jobs for a particular category of people is also a problem that we have to grapple with.