Leadership Skills for Future Leaders

Business Sector Blogs

Many of us who do human resources and social media work have a list of favorite blogs. Many people who fiollow business like to read blogs in their field or industry.  I’d like to recommend one today.

If you work in the food service industry, whether that be retail grocery of food processing/production or even the restaurant industry, I would recommend that you check out the Morning News Beat blog. Morning News Beat describes itself as “Retail News in Context, Analysis with Attitude” and is mostly written by Kevin Coupe, with contributions from his colleague, Michael Sansolo.

It is a source of news covering a lot of different topics, including good wine discoveries and where to get good cheeseburgers. You should check it out.

Leadership Skills for Future Managers

What caught myattention today was a piece written by Michael Sansolo in which he discusses working with the food industry to build the skill set of the next generation of managers and leaders in the food industry.  It seems to me these are skills that are applicable to any industry, including human resources.

I’m getting a taste of that this week at the food marketing Institute (FMI) Future Connect conference, a project geared at building skills for the next generation of leaders in the food industry. (If you haven’t seen this full disclosure before, let me say it again: I have a huge bias on this issue. I helped FMI conceive and plan the entire meeting and I’m currently in Dallas helping FMI run it.)

Management’s challenge as we move into the next decade – amazingly, the second decade of the 21st century – is much like mathematics with a graphing calculator: it is a mix of the old and the new. The old is pretty straight forward and as challenging as ever. Tomorrow’s leaders, much like today’s and yesterday’s, have to master a range of skills as managers. They have to learn to hire, to train and to mentor. They need to master feedback, communication and decision making. And, of course, they need to learn flexibility to make their skills constantly fit the changing needs of the market, the competition, the workforce and the times.

That’s just the beginning. As students traverse the Future Connect agenda they are also learning about the emerging skills that promise to challenge them daily into the future.

For instance, they have to learn to master the new forms of communication to both employees and customers. Ad Age reported recently on the growing power of independent tweets and blogs to influence the success and failure of movies to a larger extent than traditional reviews. No doubt every business and every manager will learn this truth too. It’s now on the agenda.

They’ll have to learn to master the intricacies of complex issues such as food safety, nutrition and the changing value equation. They’ll need to understand the shifting tastes and fashions of every day to make sure their business is current, relevant and important. And they’ll need to master issues many of us today cannot even conceive of, much as we couldn’t have predicted so much in the past.

It’s a challenge that’s not for the weak. Lucky for me, I get to travel to many meetings at many companies, where I’m getting to see the beginning of a generational shift. Though it bothers me that I recently had an audience more conversant with Miley Cyrus than Led Zeppelin, the truth is that shift is overdue.

Hopefully as these new leaders come along, we Baby Boomers can teach them about management skills and they can help us understand the new tools. Together we’ll do better.

What skills are missing?  What skills  need to be added to this list for our future managers and leaders, especially those in Human Resources?

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Tagged as: Business, leadership, Management, Social Media