“As we look ahead, leaders will be those who empower others.” – Bill Gates

 My book Golden Stripes – Leadership on the High Seas was published in 2017. I often wonder if my book is still relevant now, four years since, and will continue to be thirty or fifty years later. What, for instance, will be the maritime leadership paradigm in 2049?

I don’t have a crystal ball, but for reference, I looked at what others are saying. The World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that the top skills for 2025 include leadership along with complex problem-solving, active learning strategies, self-management, creativity, and technology use. Jacob Morgan starts his book The Future Leader with a maritime analogy and goes on to inform that a large group of CEOs opine that leadership will be based on a set of existing fundamental principles but those future leaders will need to build on top of these things with a new arsenal of skills and mindsets.

Perhaps it’s also helpful to look at how the context of leadership has evolved through time, and attempt to extrapolate how things could progress in the future. Captains can no longer chain people to the galley benches and order them to row. Nor are physical punishments on a ship allowed since the late 1800s. From the late 1900s, an improvement in social consciousness has gradually removed race and gender barriers, there are laws prohibiting child labour, and work and rest hours are regulated. A good leader is not a tyrant and vice versa; thankfully laws have made it less possible for abusive behaviour in the workplace. Social equality and improved communication tools have helped reduce power distances and transparency across all levels of the workforce, and mean that leaders can be held accountable as much as their subordinates. Interestingly, in a survey by Ultimate Software and The Center for Generational Kinetics, 80% of employees said they could do their job without their managers. This means that leaders cannot take their position for granted and will continue to need to bring their own strong technical skillset to add value to the team.

The evolution of technology has made it possible for workplaces, both at sea and elsewhere, to have progressively lean teams. Most members of this team will have specialised technical skills. As the WEF also points out, some of the skills required in the future are flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding. Skilled people are in great demand, and any leader’s top priority today is to recruit the right talent from a global workforce pool and get the best out of them in alignment with the organisation’s goals. To do that, a leader needs more than a carrot and a stick in their toolbox; a leader needs to tap into the intrinsic motivation of their team members and provide them with the right environment, psychological safety, and support.

The Covid pandemic and remote work have shown that giving people real control over various aspects of their work — whether it’s deciding what to work on or when to do it – has paid dividends. This experience should serve well, even after we return to our respective work environments. Perhaps this will be a working model for many.

Also, since technology is evolving rapidly, leaders need to be agile in adapting to new technology and ensuring that their team can upskill or reskill. A WEF survey predicts that at least 50% of all employees will need reskilling by as early as 2025. Evolving technology and complexity come with risk; managing that risk goes hand in hand with adapting to a new way of work. Whether it is the evolution from the sextant to ECDIS, autonomous ships, or new propulsion methods, maritime leaders will need to continually be ahead of the curve. This also means you cannot be the smartest person in the room all the time; a leader will need to defer to expertise, both within and outside their team, perhaps even to a machine-interface. With improvements in big data analytics and artificial intelligence, leaders will have more decision support tools at their disposal. However, the responsibility to communicate, setting a vision, giving meaning, making ethical and sustainable choices- will still originate in human emotion.

I expect that a leader in 2049 will still have to lead by example, with passion and commitment, rather than just by authority. Maritime leaders will still need to possess some core expertise and get their hands dirty when required. As has been expected of them in the past, good leaders of the future will need to display courage and a ‘can-do’ attitude, communicate well, and inspire others. Finally, even with the giant strides in technology, leaders must remain respectful of the environment in which they operate, their colleagues and stakeholders.

Finally, as per prevailing wisdom, the best way to predict the future is to create it. The State of Leadership Development report by Development Dimensions International, Inc. (DDI) found that half the organisations surveyed said that their leaders are not skilled to lead their organisations effectively today. 71% of the respondents said their leaders are not ready to lead their organisations into the future. (DDI, 2015) Another DDI report (‘Ready-Now Leaders, 2014) found that 85% of executives are not confident in their own leadership pipelines. Studies have shown that not all leaders are good mentors; they are so caught up in the current operational context that the creation of future leadership is a can that gets kicked down the road. The survey found that more than half of the interviewed professionals have never had any sort of mentoring. At the same time, other studies have shown that all good leaders have had good mentors. For us to create better leaders for the future, we need to invest in them today.