The rapid pace of change in business has many organizations worried that their people won’t have the skills they need to lead the workforce of the future.

The days of hierarchical business models, where the person at the top makes all the decisions, and everyone below them blindly follows suit are quickly coming to an end. Companies today need teams that have the skills to be innovative, and the authority to make decisions, engage with customers, and drive solutions that improve the customer experience.

But to create that kind of environment, leaders need skills and strategies that will help engage and inspire their workforce. And according to Deloitte’s 2019 Human Capital Trends report, they are not adapting as quickly as they should.

The report found that 83 percent of respondents say their c-suiters rarely collaborate, 81 percent believe leaders need to learn how to lead through “more complexity and ambiguity,” 47 percent say they need to be able to manage a workforce with a combination of humans and machines, and more than half (53 percent) say changing customer expectations are creating a new context for leadership in their organization.

These are all important leadership strategies in a world where change is constant, technology is being leveraged in new ways, and the demand for more innovative solutions is forcing leaders out of their comfort zone

Yet many of them are failing to make this transition. The survey found that only 41 percent of respondents thought their organization was ready to meet these new leadership requirements.

The “Must-Have” Skill Set For Leaders

In response, many organizations are seeking alternative forms of leadership development to help their executives develop new skills, and figure out how to lead in a more uncertain and collaborative environment. Many of them are turning to design thinking programs and workshops to help these wary leaders unlock their creativity and adopt new ways of working.

Design thinking is an ideal skill set for leaders who need to figure out how they can help their people solve big, complex, human-centered problems, and brainstorm innovative solutions that will improve the customer experience.

The good news is that most leaders already have these skills, they’ve just let them fall dormant. Leaders today spend so much of their time responding to crises, attending meetings, charming shareholders, and following procedure, that they have little time left over to think about new ways of working or how they can encourage creativity and innovation in the way their people operate.

ExperiencePoint’s design thinking workshops help leaders learn out how awaken their own latent problem-solving energy, and how to infuse that behavior into the rest of the workforce.

Embracing design thinking methods can be the first and most powerful step in this vital culture change process. It gives leaders the tools (and permission) to change the way they identify and deal with problems, and it helps them to finally abandon their hierarchical notions about leadership so that they can embrace a new way of working.

For organizations that are worried about how to lead in the future of work, design thinking could be just the answer they are looking for.

Learn how to enable innovation skill-building at scale here or download our free ebook Kickstart Innovation: A Guide for Organizations.