The rise of temporary talent: How to manage your contingent workforce
WHAT DEFINES A GOOD LEADER? LOOK FOR THESE SIX QUALITIES
Modern business challenges can require new approaches. Leadership will need to evolve in order to continue to guide organisations in tomorrow's world of work. But what are the characteristics of a good modern leader in the workplace - and how can organisations develop them?
Many studies draw parallels between effective leadership and solid organisational performance. But whether they’re a junior manager or a senior executive, the qualities that leaders need are changing.
Nearly 1,500 HR professionals ranked leadership development as the number one priority for 2025, with managers feeling 'overwhelemed' by the expansion of their responsibilities. In today’s unpredictable world, you must combine traditional leadership skills with new abilities. So, what does an effective modern leader look like?
1. Remember what makes a good leader
Before looking at the new skills future leaders may need, it is worth reflecting on what a leader actually is.
What are the qualities of a good leader? It’s not what you may think.
Being in charge of colleagues does not necessarily make you a ‘leader’. Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explains: “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”
Retired astronaut Chris Hadfield believes that good leadership is: “Not about glorious crowning acts. It’s about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it. Especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter.”
There may be varying opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of leaders. But overall, most people believe that great leaders motivate their team members to perform their best and achieve common goals.
What traits do you need to achieve this in the modern workplace?
2. Use blended leadership styles for a VUCA world
Stacey Philpot from Deloitte Consulting maintains that the core skills needed historically in leadership roles have remained unchanged.
“These skills allow someone to become a leader faster than their peers. This is even true in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment,” she says.
The core skills for leading in a VUCA environment include:
- Pattern recognition
- Motivation
- Agility
- Emotional intelligence
- Ability to understand, control and express emotions
This represents psychological assessments of 23,000 senior leaders globally over the past 25 years.
Consider introducing servant leadership:
Leaders need new styles of leadership to deal with changing cultures. Being comfortable with not having the answer and owning failure can create an environment of trust and openness.
Collectively, these behaviours form ‘servant leadership’. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) defines servant leadership as emphasising behaviours and values such as:
- Active listening
- Empathy
- Leading by example
These are instead of opting for a more authoritative, ‘command-and-control’ leadership style. Leaders create the conditions for team members to excel by displaying vulnerability. But given the stigma around servant leadership, how can organisations encourage it?
How to combat stigma surrounding servant leadership:
Alsu Polyakova, HR Leader for GE Healthcare, says reducing stigma around servant leadership will take a specific strategy. Most importantly frequent performance appraisals for leaders.
“We give leaders lots of opportunities for self-reflection, so they understand how they behave,” she says. GE Healthcare’s most successful leaders help to encourage behavioural change, Polyakova says. The company measures success by how well employees rate leaders on achieving GE Healthcare’s ‘cultural pillars’. These pillars include inspiring trust and empowering employees.
3. Create a culture of trust in the workplace
Gaining workers’ trust is more important than ever. One way to build trust is for leaders to take action on issues such as climate change. 71 percent of employees consider their CEOs’ social awareness as critically important, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Social awareness may yield rich rewards. The Edelman poll shows that workers who trust their employers are far more engaged and remain more loyal than their more sceptical peers.
Leadership styles are clearly changing. The most effective leaders will need to tailor their styles to suit different scenarios, says Professor Sattar Bawany. “Leaders need a broad repertoire of management styles and the wisdom to know when each style should be used,” he says. “In crisis scenarios like cybersecurity breaches, for example, leadership should be authoritarian because the scenario is unstructured.”
4. Adapt your leadership style for different generations
Managers must also balance leadership styles to suit different generations. Modern workplaces will soon house up to five generations under one roof. Therefore, there will be many people with differing preferences on leadership style.
As of 2023, millennials are the biggest group in the UK workforce, at 35 percent. Modern leaders must mix old and new leadership styles that meet the needs of younger generations. Doing so will future proof organisations. However, new leadership approaches cannot come at the expense of alienating older workers.
5. Commit to lifelong learning
With the workplace evolving so rapidly, leaders cannot rely on past experience alone to get by. Ben Farmer, Head of HR at Amazon UK agrees: “Experience is not always synonymous with wisdom and judgement. And naivety doesn’t always engender novel thinking and openness to change.”
Organisations should look for leaders who understand the future as well as those with experience. “Success comes from the ability to combine understanding of exciting, new trends with the experience required to put that knowledge into action,” says Farmer.
But what is the right balance? There is no one-size-fits-all approach when balancing experience with adaptability. Achieving the right balance will mostly depend on the organisation and the sector it operates in.
6. Be conscious of culture
Organisational culture is an important factor. Risk-averse firms may prefer experience over novel thinking. Leaders may be fearful of a backlash from stakeholders should novel thinking fail. To lower risk, companies should seek leaders who use both scientific evidence and intuition when making decisions.
Ultimately, there’s no single blueprint for an effective modern leader. Each organisation must tailor their approach to leadership development. There must be a focus on organisational culture, industry nuances and employee mix.
But above all, leaders should recognise that today’s reality may be old news tomorrow.
For more expert advice, take a look at the following articles:
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The rise of temporary talent: How to manage your contingent workforce
The contingent workforce consists of a growing number of individuals that are hired to execute work on a non-permanent, per-project basis.
The skills and services of this segment are engaged subject to the needs of the organisation. In lieu of the need to provide continuous, permanent employment, contingent labour can offer a cost-sensitive strategy that can flex to changes in the market.
However, the incorporation of contingent workers is not without risk. Poor visibility across this segment of the workforce can trigger concerns surrounding contracts and compliance.
But with 70% of executives planning to hire more contingent workers, leaders must integrate this growing talent network as part of their workforce strategy, or bear the greatest risk of all – being left behind.
The growth of the contingent workforce explained
Gig workers, flexible labour, non-payroll workers, independent contractors, freelancers and agency workers – while the terminology may differ, one thing prevails: contingent labour is quickly becoming a staple of the modern organisation. Reports place the number of contingent workers in the US at 51.5 million, totalling 35% of the nation’s workforce.
Although non-permanent employees have been deployed for over three decades in the oil, gas and engineering industries, a number of global megatrends have promoted the accelerated adoption of the contingent workforce model across all industries, at all levels and in all job roles.
Sourcing skills: Interest in the contingent labour market is being driven, in part, by a talent-supply mismatch. With 9 in every 10 businesses reporting skills shortages, contingent workers offer some much-needed assistance in plugging the skills gap.
And leveraging the niche skillsets of temporary talent will become crucial as we operate in an increasingly digital environment. Research indicates that nearly two-thirds of executives believe that the external workforce will help their organisation to ‘compete’, with contingent workers opening the door to the outsourcing of specialised IT and digital skills.
Responding to change: A shared desire for flexibility is also encouraging more organisations to embrace the contingent workforce model.
For employees, the coalescing forces of globalisation and technology permit individuals to move more freely between roles than ever before. Intermediary platforms connect supply with demand, enabling talent and employers to ‘seek each other out, on more equal terms, from anywhere in the world’.
Flexibility will be vital to companies tackling seasonal or market-driven fluctuations and rapidly evolving customer needs. Contingent workers allow dramatic growth to occur overnight, creating an agile workforce model that mirrors the ‘ebb and flow of demand’.
Drawing on the contingent workforce also offers a more strategic approach to change management. Contingent workers provide a critical bridge in the integration of new products and services, helping organisations to overcome resistance from ‘legacy’ or permanent staff.
A New World of Work: The onset of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is fundamentally restructuring our understanding of ‘the worker’. Research by Deloitte concluded that the ‘job’ will soon become a relic of the Industrial Era. Companies will instead need to build agile, cross-functional teams, borrowing talent for limited time periods to tackle the increasingly complex problems that organisations face.
Key strategies to success
To thrive in the new world of work will therefore require a change in mindset, adopting a total talent approach that breaks down the silos between permanent and temporary staff to deliver the right talent, at the right time, regardless of source or classification.
This is no easy feat. Indeed, market sentiment suggests that many businesses feel as though they are yet to deploy an operating model suited to the next normal. With the pressure on, we’ve outlined three key pillars of a successful contingent workforce management strategy.
Policy: Before engaging with this growing talent pool, organisation must ensure oversight of the relevant rules and regulations that dictate the contingent workforce.
Misclassification remains one of the greatest risks, with severe financial and reputational repercussions for those who fail to comply with legislation.
Organisations will also need to build rigorous processes to ensure data and intellectual property are protected as the workforce becomes more fluid. A thorough selection and vetting process, onboarding, training and off-boarding programme can protect against the loss of valuable information or security breaches.
Productivity: While ‘hard work’ may have once manifested itself in the individuals who were first to arrive at the office and the last to ‘clock out’ each day, the incorporation of contingent workers has rendered this definition of productivity entirely obsolete.
No longer bound to the office, or even a 40-hour week, contingent workers must be managed with metrics that monitor outcomes. Indeed, the nature of the contingent worker means that organisations have very little scope to dictate or control the means and manner in which work is completed.
With organisations required to place a high level of trust in their temporary workforce, a clearly defined Statement of Work can foster a sense of accountability, tying talent to defined timescales and deliverables.
People: Recent data highlights the fragmentation of teams, with 58% of gig workers feeling as though their permanent counterparts are treated better by organisations.
A strong company culture can offer a strong foundation, connecting an ecosystem of employees under a unified purpose.
But with efforts to disseminate organisational culture already the source of many corporate headaches, the rise of the contingent workforce adds an additional layer of complexity to the work of HR, Culture and Talent Acquisition specialists. When so many of the traditional levers don’t apply, how can leaders support temporary talent?
We’d advise creating a version of your culture that is intentionally shaped toward your contingent workforce and their valuable contributions. While a generous holiday allowance and extensive wellbeing programme may not hold the same gravitas, some key aspects transcend contracts.
Creating opportunities for learning and development, for example, can deepen the relationship with contingent workers. Author Dan Pink states that most freelancers are ‘starving’ for input. Carving out time to regularly revisit the targets negotiated as part of the Statement of Work will benefit both parties.
Turn up the tempo
Once these pillars are in place, you can turn to technology to realise the true potential of your external workforce.
Streamline your strategy
A Vendor Management System (VMS) allows you to plan, engage, deploy and measure with purpose.
During requisition, time-consuming tasks such as background checks can be automated, enabling a quicker time to deployment. Once integrated into the workforce, a tailored VMS can increase visibility, providing vital insights into skillsets, length of service and project progression, allowing you to build talent pools that can be deployed and redeployed to serve the needs of the organisation.
And with an estimated 1 in 4 projects undertaken by service providers not completed on time or on budget, a VMS can drive strategic cost-efficiency gains.
Leveraging a range of real-time data analytics linked to specific project goals offers oversight of those who are performing well (and at what cost), but also the milestones that have been missed. Instant identification enables you to work with teams to identify barriers and put the project back on course, avoiding substantial rework or delays.
The implementation of a sophisticated VMS can elevate the integration of temporary talent from ‘just-in-time’ workers to key assets of your workforce management strategy, sourcing and placing the right talent where it’s needed most.
A brave new world (of work)
The new world of work is undeniably more complex. Skills shortages, rapid market fluctuations and an emerging ‘revolution’ will force organisations to adapt at warp speed, if they aren’t already doing so.
The good news is that these challenges have ‘spurred’ many VMS vendors to innovate, developing end-to-end management capabilities that incorporate compliance and shift management, leverage next-generation artificial intelligence and provide holistic insights by combining multiple data sources.
To survive, companies will need to embrace the contingent labour market. But in order to thrive, organisations must grapple with compliance, track performance and manage a resourcing process that consists of thousands of interactions between a variety of stakeholders and often disconnected technologies.
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