This content comes from Hudson’s quarterly Insights Newsletter, which examines current trends and events in the world of work from a developmental point of view. If you’re interested in subscribing to the newsletter, click here.

We’ve spent much of this year contemplating the future of leadership and organizational culture in the midst of constant change. Accenture has measured the rate of change affecting business as increasing 183% since 2020. And with concerns of a new economic downturn on the horizon, the urgency for organizations to become more resilient and adaptable is only increasing. We have an opportunity to shift the way we think about our relationships, roles, and responsibilities as humans at work. 

We’re excited to unveil our CEO, Michael Hudson’s, new white paper Rethinking Leadership. In it, Michael outlines a new paradigm for leaders, called developmental leadership. Please visit this link to download the paper.

Developmental leadership is an approach to managing people that emphasizes building trustful professional relationships and facilitating growth. When deployed at scale in an organization, developmental leadership makes everyday development accessible to all employees and makes the workforce more resilient, innovative, and engaged.

We’ll spend the next few newsletters exploring topics that reveal why now is the time to rethink leadership.

Rethinking Relationships

The world of work continues to struggle with well-being and engagement in the post-pandemic landscape. The social fabric is worn thin, and it’s not just about remote work. Disruption leads to misalignment and, as put in HBR, we need to rewrite our psychological contracts to realign our relationships with one another and the organization to prepare for ongoing change. This is key to restoring trust, cultivating a sense of purpose, and simply making work more enjoyable — all things that drive satisfaction, engagement, and performance.

Gallup’s research on friendship at work points directly to these benefits, showing that having a “best friend” at work is correlated with many outcomes employers are looking for. That said, encouraging employees to make a best friend risks infringingon boundaries, much like when employees are encouraged to think of one another as “family.” Look to this MIT Sloan article for a helpful point of view on satisfying, healthy, and appropriate workplace friendships.

Friendship is nice, but it’s not the requirement. Those driving culture in organizations and teams should strive for connection, alignment, respect, and communicationto be resilient in the face of disruption. Leaders can look for experiments to build connection on their teams, like intergenerational group projects and creating shared rituals. 

For a scalable way to create new connections across a large organization, look to group coaching. We recently hosted a fantastic panel on the subject, featuring talent leaders and coaches from Accenture, McKinsey, and Google discussing how group coaching is used to build connection at their organizations. Read a recap here or watch the recording.

In the event of a recession, this focus on relationships becomes even more important. Experts cite decentralizing decision-making as key to agility and resilience in a downturn. Effective decentralization requires alignment up and down the organization, psychological safety, and collaboration, which in turn require that healthy relationship dynamics are endemic to the organization’s culture. This is exactly what developmental leadership is designed to achieve. The framework consists of a mindset, skills, and habits that can be adopted by a leader at any level. When deployed at scale, the culture begins to shift and these qualities become self-reinforcing. Read Rethinking Leadership to learn more.