Senior Partner, Korn Ferry International MENA WE live in a real-time, immediate gratification world. That's why we count IPOs, obsess over GDP growth projections, inbound investment, job creation and Saudization, stock market trends, etc. to measure the ongoing success of Saudi's economic transformation strategy. Real lasting, transformative change takes place behind the numbers. We are talking a form of change with the power to unleash the vast potential of one of Saudi's greatest assets: a fast, young, well-educated and highly capable next generation of young business leaders. The key to this change: fostering and embracing the idea of the new Self-Disruptive Leader. The concept of the Self-Disruptive Leader comes from a recent global Korn Ferry research that shows that 70% of investors expect Saudi companies to deliver significant and accelerated transformative change in the next 3 to 5 years to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving economic environment. However, investors believe only 32% of these Saudi executives demonstrate the level of agility and adaptability necessary to lead the accelerated transformation they expect. The message from investors is not that we need to change leaders! We have highly capable and trusted leaders. Rather it's a call to action for today's top business executives to disrupt their management style to better adapt to a changing and uncertain future of work. That call to action includes abandoning a traditional command-and-control leadership mentality for one that empowers a new generation of self-disruptive leaders deep within and across highly diverse corporations. This kind of shift in leadership style requires a higher level of trust in emerging leaders than we may see today, as well as a new form of employee engagement and deployment. It asks today's executives to empower managers deeper within companies by turning over genuine ownership and responsibility for ideation and innovation. It can also mean asking today's leadership to embrace a greater degree of experimentation, which comes with it accepting and learning from failures that can drive future innovation and growth. The challenge is how to go beyond the theory of self-disruption with actionable recommendations that drive tangible outcomes. With analysis of Korn Ferry proprietary database of more than 150,000 business executives, we identified 5 dimensions of leadership that directly correlate to executive and company success: Anticipate, Drive, Accelerate, Partner and Trust. Fostering these 5 traits in our future leaders requires more than simply re-tooling traditional employee development programs. At Korn Ferry, we believe that it requires a commitment to re-thinking a company's approach to how it organizes and deploys its people from the earliest stages of their careers. The following are a few examples of new approaches to talent deployment and organization that can make a real impact on developing and retaining high-performance employees while driving improved business results. • Job sharing programs. This is not about having two people do one job. Rather it's about fostering the ability to partner at early stages in a career to enable functional adaptability while engendering a culture of learning. Sharing responsibility teaches young people early on how to partner, trust and recognize there is more than one way to do a job. • Flexible working practices. Contemporary working arrangements that take into account an individual's personal needs and preferences is shown to increase level of engagement and commitment. It implies a degree of trust that leads to stronger bonds between management and employees. This concept goes far beyond when and where an employee puts their time in. We are seeing a number of Saudi companies creating less traditional working spaces that promote creativity and give individuals a greater sense of personal control. • Replace "job pools" with diverse "talent pools". The traditional corporate model focuses on pools of jobs, like finance, marketing, HR, sales, etc., with people in those pools distributed across the company as needed. Imagine that by implementing a job-sharing program, you can take 25% of each person's time to join "talent pools" that are used to form strategic project teams. Those individuals now can get exposure to and collaborate with a much wider range of people across an organization, learning new skills and gaining valuable experience. These are not actionable strategies a company should execute in a vacuum. Rather they should be seen as a starting point for restructuring and redeploying people to make them more effective today while investing in greater future impact. For future leaders, this kind of approach helps expand "what I do", "what I know" and "how I act". Bottom line, it makes me a better and more valuable company asset both today and tomorrow. For companies, this approach can remove layers of hierarchy and bureaucracy that impede corporate agility and slow the pace of transformation. At the same time, it can instill a greater sense of individual purpose in employees that makes them want to better contribute to overall success. It all starts at the top, but it's a change that has the potential for a significant return on investment through the ability to harness the power of one of the greatest assets behind the Saudi Vision 2030 economic transformation strategy... the power of youth.
