In my last posting I wrote about some interesting facts and suppositions about the future of work from a Time Magazine series of articles. This week I am finishing off with a few more thoughts that I found fascinating.

Female management will continue to grow as a percentage of overall corporate management. Many current studies show that women focus more on long-term return, and manage more cautiously than men. This would appear to be a great fit with the fact that our economy is probably going to rebound at a slow rate, over a long period of time. Plus, female management tends to be better in using Emotional Intelligence skills than males, and other studies show office productivity to be higher under female managers.

Gen Xer's (born between 1965-1978) will be in control in 10 years. They will be good at management styles their predecessors never had to learn, such as collaborative decision making, virtual-based project teams and measuring productivity by individual contributions to group efforts. Would you like to know what it will take to be successful as a leader in 10 years? Play World of Warcraft, a fast-paced online collaborative game. Each player must contribute to helping the team overcome obstacles by contributing to the team effort, or risk losing their place on the team. Collaboration in a virtual world, teambuilding across distance, and successfully completing tasks linked in to people you don’t really know and never see is critical to success in the game. Now that's a different kind of training class!

Finally, work will shift to using people who provide essential skills, and the rest will be outsourced. You will be able to work from anywhere, but all of your keystrokes will be logged. Your boss will know you are at work, and what you do. Teams will be even more crucial in providing service and solutions, and weaker team members will be exposed as they will prevent the team from reaching goals. So the only reason to go to work 10 years from now is to do work. The ability to just hang out and work on the margins will be gone. Because if you do that, your job will be given to someone else who works cheaper and is less privileged than you.

Some really interesting food for thought, especially for the readers who plan on being leaders in 10 years. What will these issues require of us as leaders? The time to start thinking about that is now.

Here is a link to the issue and the articles, and I encourage you to read them and think about the possible implications for leaders.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1898024_1898023,00.html?artId=?contType=?chn=