5 Leadership Development Practices for 2023 Revealed

Leadership, executive and career coach Jeff Roth reveals the top priorities leaders will face in 2023 and the best practices necessary to successfully achieve them. These tips will increase your effectiveness, elevate your performance and drive better business results.

The themes for 2023’s best leadership practices are:

Deepening engagement between leadership and your team with a commitment to driving business results
Increasing proactivity while reducing reactivity
Boosting communication
Improving active, intuitive listening skills
Leading with empathy

“Human leadership” is the next evolution of leadership, according to a recent Gartner survey. In fact, 90% of human resources leaders believe that to succeed in today’s workplace environment, leaders must focus on the human aspects of leadership. Yet, in another survey conducted the same month, just 29% of employees report that their leader is a “human leader.”

Leadership Priorities for 2023

During the pandemic, employees actively sought new opportunities when they believed their current ones weren’t delivering all they wanted. Leaders who had experience dealing with disruptions and adverse environments, such as recessions, dot-com bubbles and financial crises, needed to demonstrate resilience, perseverance and confidence in the face of challenges. Going forward, they will have to model how to “raise the sails in a storm,” and engage their team differently to guide the ship through rough seas.

Accordingly, leadership’s key priorities for the new year include:

Strengthening employees’ connections with their teams and companies that were weakened during the pandemic
Leading teams through an economic downturn
Retaining and attracting top talent

Leadership Development Best Practices for 2023

Based on the leadership priorities, here are the leadership development best practices for 2023.

Best Practice #1: Combat Quiet Quitting

As we move on from the pandemic, how we communicate with each other has become one of the greatest challenges for employees, managers and teams to overcome. Managers who employ leadership coaching strategies will help build trust, emotional intelligence and a better work/life balance to minimize quiet quitting. To begin this process, meet regularly with your teammates, informally check-in with them, discuss status items and challenges and build rapport.

Leaders can also employ curiosity to combat quiet quitting – be engaged and ask each employee on your team questions about what motivates them professionally and personally. Furthermore, seek to listen, understand and then be understood in your communications with them.

Avoid the urge to defend, justify or argue “why” something is or is not important to do. Always ensure that your team members know you value them and their effort, and help them connect their effort to a bigger picture or purpose.

Finally, deliver on your commitments. It’s one of the fastest and most effective ways of building trust. Nothing erodes trust as quickly as failing to do what you committed to do.

Best Practice #2: Know Your Leadership Style and Why It’s Important

Your leadership style reflects your core values. These determine what you desire, strive to attain and how you define success. Your core values communicate how others can best work with you as well as the culture and environment in which you work best.

Knowing your core motivators is vital to your own self-awareness as a leader. It’s also critical to inspiring your team members to execute to their best abilities.

Best Practice #3: Help Your Team Know You with a Leadership User Manual

At its core, a leadership user manual is a playbook for others to use as an effective learning tool for the next level of leaders. It also shortens the learning curve for others to get to know your leadership style and what to expect from you as a leader. Share this manual with your team members, key business partners and new hires to provide a clear perspective on who you are and how you relate to people.

Your user manual should answer critical questions clearly and concisely—in no more than a page or two. Developing this manual will allow you as a leader to identify what’s important to you, what it takes to optimize your performance, what’s likely to get in your way and will also give you insight into your leadership style.

When you provide clear expectations for your employees, you help to ensure success and productivity. The manual also serves as a form of accountability for leadership, increases transparency and enhances team relationships.

Best Practice #4: Conquer Team Management Challenges

Leaders who overcome team management challenges see their teams perform with less stress, greater satisfaction and more consistency in delivering higher quality outcomes. This enables leaders to have a greater impact on their business’ direction and strategy. Ultimately, leaders of well-managed teams do a better job of attracting and retaining talent over poorly managed teams.

One of the most critical aspects of being a leader is delegation. Successful delegation starts with identifying opportunities with well-defined rules, outcomes and parameters.

As a leader improves delegation skills, other challenges arise such as managing performance and having difficult conversations. Effectively managing performance requires communication to achieve buy-in and ensure alignment on priorities. To succeed in conquering these challenges, meet with your team members individually on a consistent basis, at least once every two weeks, and utilize standing agenda points as topics for your one-on-ones.

A perennial challenge at any level of management is balancing what feels like competing or conflicting needs of your team, your boss or the broader organization. The conflict typically concerns aggressive deadlines, increased demands, diminishing resources or unrelenting iterations on a project.

Navigating this effectively requires some political savvy that’s not manipulative or disingenuous. Review your level of autonomy and authority as well as others’ motivations and priorities. Clarity on these factors can spur supportive and honest conversations, which can lead to out-of-the box thinking to solve challenges.

Best Practice #5: Succeed in the C-Suite

C-level executives are charged with delivering results consistently and sustainably, developing vision and strategies, identifying and responding to market opportunities and demands and building strong teams. As such, they need the management skills to achieve high-level performance and success.

These executives have to be proficient technically and interpersonally, which requires prioritization, decision-making, delegation and execution, talent identification and selection and deep subject matter expertise.

Essential leadership skills for C-level execs also include emotional intelligence, listening and communicating, strategic thinking, motivating and inspiring others as well as navigating internal politics.

Implement Best Practices Through Leadership Coaching

In 2023, leaders will face the combined challenges of delivering results during a time of economic uncertainty and dealing with decreased employee engagement. Some may say that each challenge makes the other more formidable.

They’re missing the opportunity to solve both.

By selecting the right leadership coach and focusing on your leadership effectiveness— mastering the skills and behaviors necessary to deliver results while making it rewarding for others to work with you—you’ll set your team and yourself up to succeed, build resilience and deliver your best work regardless of the situations or conditions you face.

Interested in finding out how 4D Executive & Leadership Coaching by Leading Edge can support you in overcoming these challenges and capturing these opportunities? Click here to book a complimentary discovery call today.