VUCA is an acronym that stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It was first used in 1987 and based on the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus. In early 1990, US Army War college chose it as a response (seeing and reacting in new ways) to the collapse of the USSR. In today’s time, where technology is changing so fast that the whole environment is affected terrifically, it is no longer a case of finding the way or following a standard methodology. Leadership skills highly need to be reinvented and refined to match the frequency of the VUCA world. An increase in volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity means that you need to seek a new orientation to lead your life. In a one-liner, “Thinking and adapting a fresh approach to lead a better life”.
Who needs leadership skills?
Leadership is an act of leading people or a group. Leading self is known as self-leadership. Often people understand leadership skills need to be acquired by only skilled people or professionals. It’s a myth. Since we all lead our life as well as we lead others too by different roles in their life. So it is not unusual to say ‘We all are leaders.”
“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way – John Maxwell”
Considering the challenges of the VUCA world, to lead children’s super successful life, every parent needs to be reinvented leadership skills for incorporating them into the parenting style. Your parenting style can affect everything from the thinking, feeling, and behaving of your child. It’s important to ensure your parenting style is supporting healthy growth and development because the way you lead your child and how you discipline him/her will influence him/her for becoming a successful and happy person in life.
Traditionally there are four identified parenting styles.
- Authoritarian
- Authoritative
- Permissive
- Uninvolved
“Do exactly what I say”, that’s authoritarian where a child follows a path decided by parents.
“You can do whatever you want to do, I am your friend.”, that’s Permissive.
“Let’s discuss and decide the rules.” that’s Authoritative, it is the sweet spot between authoritarian and permissive parenting
“You do what you want; I really don’t care” that’s Uninvolved parenting.
All these approaches are the old styles and in practical life, a parent can’t fit into a single bucket all the time, it needs to keep changing from time to time, the age of the child and the situation. As a child grows, parenting needs to be switched from one bucket to another at a higher frequency. Here leading as a parent needs reinvention. Although there are different ways to reinvent it, one most suitable leadership skill is persuasive influence. Following this leadership style, it becomes easy for a parent to juggle different buckets of parenting styles. Let me explain it with an example. There is one very popular Bollywood movie named ‘3 Idiots’ which is based on Chetan Bhagat’s Novel. In that movie, the main character ‘Rancho’, exhibits persuasive influence and leadership skills. The base is innovation and empathy. Using these two core skills he not only leads his life successfully but helps others to lead their life successfully. If something is explained by giving the demo or digestible proofs then people understand clearly what do you want them to follow. Empathy helps a person to understand and respect others’ thought processes and feelings.
Today children have exposure but lack clarity
Today’s children have a lot of exposure but clarity is somewhere missing. They follow only those things that they find logically proven. If something doesn’t seem logical to them, they simply refuse to do that. Being a parent applying persuasive influence leadership style makes them understand how to make their children understand the importance of balancing freedom with values to design super success in life. In short, after learning it a parent can ‘hence proved’ to bring a smile of clarity to their child’s face. Learning this leadership style helps parents to gel with traditional parenting styles too by reinventing those with innovative ideas. Today’s VUCA world challenges parenting by giving unpredictable and inexperienced situations but there is a super tool of ‘coaching’ that helps parents to face it in innovative ways to lead to successful outcomes. Persuasive leadership skills can be learned with help of the coaching, which is based on NLP, Hypnosis Emotional Intelligence Techniques, etc.