These four leadership mindsets are driving the new economy

Are you able to change the culture of your organization? It’s possible, perhaps, if you can articulate what your culture is or if you are a CEO or C-suite executive. But let me ask a different question: Are you able to set a new tone and mindset for how your team, your project members, or your function work together and with others, both inside and outside your organization? The answer, in this case, is most likely to be a resounding yes.

For the past seven years, I have asked these two questions to thousands of managers and leaders from around the world in my executive education classes at MIT Sloan School of Management. With the first question, few raise their hands — even when the group comprises senior leaders. But when I ask about their capacity to set a new tone or mindset in their organizations, virtually everyone feels it’s within their scope and mandate, and the hands fly up in the air.

Why not bring about culture change by challenging leaders to adopt a new mindset that shows tangible progress toward achieving what is perceived by most to be the more elusive goal? What would that look like in practice? Suppose you are the leader of the retail division of a 170-year-old bank with a deeply risk-averse culture. The following passage, based on a real-life example, illustrates how to challenge your leadership to adopt a new mindset:

This statement embodies the leadership mindsets that are driving the new economy: leaders who passionately state that they are a community of leaders dedicated to being customer obsessed, purpose-driven, highly networked, and curiosity-driven.

For the past year I have been serving as guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s collaborative research project, The Future of Leadership in the Digital Economy, in partnership with Cognizant. We surveyed more than 4,000 managers and executives from more than 120 countries and conducted interviews with dozens of C-level executives, with the objective of understanding how a changing world and a changing world of work is influencing what it means to be a great leader. One of the most striking findings from this ongoing research initiative is that both the survey respondents and those interviewed believe that their leaders lack the mindset needed to bring about the strategic and cultural changes required to lead in the new economy. In fact, only 12% strongly agreed their leaders were prepared to move their organizations forward. Interestingly, very few interviewees talked about the need for deep culture change, perhaps for reasons similar to the example provided earlier: Affecting large-scale culture change is perceived as above most people’s pay grades. Rather, virtually all of them stressed the importance of adopting new mindsets and behaviors, as well as the importance of finding approaches that would reinforce and embed these mindsets and behaviors as the new hallmarks of leadership. But what new mindsets do leaders need to adopt?

Mindsets are mental maps that reflect and guide how people behave in organizations. They signal how people operate and what they are about. So, what leadership mindsets did respondents and interviewees feel were critical to winning in the digital economy? After analyzing our survey data and conducting a sentiment and heat map analysis of the interviews we conducted, we identified four: producers, investors, connectors, and explorers.

Producers. The producers’ mindset combines an obsession for producing customer value with a focus on analytics, digital savviness, execution, and outcomes. Producers use analytics to accelerate innovation that addresses shifts in customer preferences and improves customer and user experiences.

Brian Halligan, cofounder and CEO of HubSpot, explains the producers’ mindset:

Investors. Leaders with an investors’ mindset pursue an organizational purpose beyond increasing shareholder returns. They are dedicated to growth, but in a sustainable fashion. They care about the communities in which they operate and the welfare and continuous development of their employees. They invest in enhancing the value of their customers rather than viewing them as streams of revenue.

Susan Sobbott, former CEO and president of American Express Global Commercial Services, expresses what having an investors’ mentality means to her:

Connectors. Leaders with a connectors’ mindset understand that mastering relationships and networks is the new currency that drives organizational effectiveness in the new economy. Connectors get this at their core. It’s how they operate. They regularly bring together diverse stakeholders from both inside the company and with ecosystem partners. Connectors understand the power of creating a sense of community and belonging, so important in today’s fast-paced, breakneck-speed world where it’s easy to lose the human touch.

Here’s how Lori Beer, global CIO of JPMorgan Chase, explains why having a connectors’ mindset is so important:

Explorers. Leaders with an explorers’ mindset are curious and creative, and operate well in the fog of ambiguity. They engage in continuous experimentation and learn by listening to many varied voices. Strong indications of an explorers’ mindset include establishing behavioral norms that tolerate and indeed encourage risk-taking and even failure, reverse mentoring, and a deep curiosity about how new forces are shaping the competitive environment.

Dan Shapero, vice president of global solutions at LinkedIn, explains what having an explorers’ mindset means to him:

In the new economy, leaders who set a tone with these new mindsets signal that they aspire to reimagine what effective leadership should be. They are less fixated on the image of leader-as-hero than they are on building an amazing community of leaders at every level in their organizations. By doing so, they drive home the narrative that building a collective leadership capability is the strongest route to competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced world.