Leadership Forecast

At Georgia College, Leadership Means More

Our approach to leadership doesn't just focus on the bottom line—but on how individuals, groups, and organizations can serve the public good. We believe that every leadership challenge has a solution that can be found in the arts and sciences, and we have prepared this Leadership Forecast for 2021 to encourage our readers and stakeholders to consider this unique moment in time and to fortify them with the leadership skills to be effective.

Who Should Read this Leadership Forecast

We recommend this Leadership Forecast for anyone with an interest in leadership for the public good, particularly:

• Leaders and managers in private enterprise.
• Employers and consultants who aim to build and sustain a culture of empowered leadership within their organizations.
• C-suite executives and boards of directors.
• Nonprofit executives and board leaders.
• Public sector leaders, including local and state elected officials, appointees, and policy-makers.
• Leaders of civic organizations and community groups and clubs, including chambers of commerce and development authorities.

Key Assessments in 2021

The key assessments offered here come in the form of tactical-level guidance and direct actions leaders can take.  

• The COVID-19 crisis has hastened the arrival of Industry 4.0. Use 2021 to revisit some of your fundamental precepts of leadership.
• Leaders will do well to reflect upon, discuss, and document what they have learned in the past year about their organizations’ culture.
• Leaders should be careful not to retrofit their usual approaches into their new operating environments.
• Leaders and managers should renew and develop comprehensive talent development planning for their organizations. Education leaders need to recalibrate education delivery, including diversified and portable credentials and micro-credentials, and identify new ways of scaling their content delivery. Industry leaders need to prepare their talent development strategies for diversified, and even global, competition.
• In 2021, organizations committed to strengthening and protecting their talent pipelines should spare no effort to affirm their commitment to their members and employees.
• Leaders should consider how their organizations and networks provide outreach and offer appeal to younger generations. Particularly consider the so-called “Millennials,” the generation born between 1981 and 1995, and “Generation Z,” born after 1996.
• Leaders should work with their teams to review their organizations’ stakeholder analyses in 2021.

Our goal with this list it to offer you twenty-five recommendations for our unique historical moment. While many have been published in recent years and reflect the times in which we live, we have also chosen venerable classics that will provide insight and lend interpretive depth to your leadership in 2021 and beyond.