“Are Gen Z ready for leadership?”
I love this article from Rebecca M Knight (BBC) about leadership and age!
Are Gen Z ready for leadership? – BBC Worklife
Ms Knight and the people she’s interviewed have hit the nail on the head about leadership, in my view.
“Ultimately, there is no one right age for leadership, say management experts. Inexperience can be both positive and negative. Youth is both an asset and a liability. The right age to lead depends on the individual and the situation, says [Caroline] Webb, [leadership coach, author and senior adviser at McKinsey.]
After all, people don’t magically gain the smarts, charisma and self-awareness to guide a company and manage a workforce once they hit their 50s. “I work with plenty of older leaders who lack self-awareness,” she says. “It’s not binary.””
Basically, they’re saying, is that effective leadership boils down to your level of self-awareness, your confidence to unleash your creativity, and being willing to get curious, ask for help or advice, and seek other perspectives when you run into your own limitations and blind spots.
We typically think that ‘with age comes wisdom’, and while this can be true, that’s just a way of pointing to experience. Which we start to accumulate from birth. And our experience can be whatever we make it, shaped and influenced by whatever situations and contexts we find ourselves in as we journey through life.
It’s our creativity, underpinned by our self-awareness and curiosity, that offers us the opportunity to turn our experiences, passions and talents into powerful, effective and adaptable leadership, fit for today’s and future demands.
How would you rate your own creative leadership? Better yet, how would others rate it?
