Cover Story
Trust me: The changing face of
leadership in 2020 and beyond
From the time we’re children through adolescence and into
adulthood, there’s a common phrase spoken by the people
in our lives. We’ve likely heard it from our parents when
encouraging us to try something new – or maybe from a
friend when navigating a road-trip shortcut. Perhaps we’ve
heard a boss say it when trying to convince a team that
changing a project’s strategic direction is a good idea. That
phrase is “Trust me.” It’s one thing to hear it; it’s entirely
another to believe it. Trust is a critical component in most
personal and professional relationships. However, it’s a
scarce commodity in our modern world. Specifically, distrust
in our leaders is a pervasive problem that severely impacts
our professional lives. According to Forbes and the 2017
Edelman Trust Barometer, 63% of employees don’t trust
their leaders. A critical component of leading any team in
any situation is trust. Simply, it’s the foundation that strong
leadership is built on.
Internationally recognized professor,
au t hor and sp eaker for her work
studying vulnerability, Brené Brown
has a lot to say about the trust involved
in bringing our whole, human selves to
work. First, she reminds us that we’re
all just people, no matter our rank or
experience level. Inviting individuals
to bring their entire selves to work
Brené Brown
@graphicarts
requires a great deal of trust because
leaders take on the responsibility of
inviting potentially messy, but whole-
hearted people to work. Thankfully,
more and more leaders are acknow-
ledging that they’re part of imperfect,
whole-hearted human teams. They’re
peeling back the titles and the egos
built up over the course of modern
corporate history, and they’re coming
back to strategies that put a spotlight
on our shared humanity – our imperfect
and vulnerable, yet caring humanness.
The idea of celebrating our human
qualities at work becomes especially
fascinating in the age of artificial intel-
ligence. Brown sheds light on the
irony of today’s juxtaposed business
landscape: “...the same time as we’re
worrying about machine learning and
artificial intelligence taking jobs into
humanizing work, we are intentionally,
or unintentionally, creating cultures
that, instead of leveraging the unique
gifts of the human heart (like empathy,
vulnerability and emotional literacy),
we’re trying to lock those gifts away.”
Machines are really good at crunching
numbers and not having an ego to bruise,
but they’re not so good at matters of the
heart, which is the backbone of strong
leadership. This sentiment is echoed
by Dr. Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, Director
at The London School of Economics:
“In the past, jobs were about muscles;
now they’re about brains. But in the
future, they’ll be about the heart.”
As we approach the next decade, how
will strong leadership be defined?
What will allow good leaders to elevate
themselves objectively and reach the
level of a great leader? In examining
the research, I believe that strong
leadership will be focused more directly
on building trust – and it will look a
lot more ‘human'. In fact, I dare to
predict that leadership in 2020 and
beyond will be underscored by our
‘shared humanity'. By this I mean
leadership being open to bringing
GRAPHIC ARTS MAGAZINE | November 2019 | 15