Emerging Leadership Competencies for a Multigenerational Workforce

📊 Summary of Emerging Leadership Competencies

The article presents results from a survey of HR professionals on the competencies most important for leading in a multigenerational workforce. The top three emerging leadership traits are:

1. Innovative Thinking

• Leaders must embrace creativity and adaptability.

• Future-forward problem-solving and agility are essential in diverse work settings.

2. Technology Knowledge

• Competency in digital tools is no longer optional.

• Leaders must bridge the gap between generations that grew up in analog versus digital environments.

3. Multigenerational Organizational Skills

• Leaders must manage, communicate, and collaborate across age groups with different workplace expectations.

• Empathy and cross-generational awareness are vital.

The article emphasizes that while these three emerging leadership competencies are foundational, balance is the key. It’s not about specializing in one and ignoring the others—HR leaders should cultivate a well-rounded leadership profile across their organizations.

🧠 Original Insight (MorganHR POV)

At MorganHR, we see this as a call to align competency development with succession planning and performance evaluation systems. It’s not enough to name the traits—we need to build them into:

• Leadership development frameworks

• Job architecture

• Merit increase criteria

HR systems and tools (like SimplyMerit) can help reinforce and track these traits across teams in a structured, data-driven way.