The Demands of Future Leadership
Tomorrow’s top leaders will need to be able to do it all, finds a new survey conducted by HRI and commissioned by the American Management Association. Gone are the days, if they ever really existed, when a leader could conjure up some strategic promised land, point in the general direction, and expect followers to march in lockstep. Tomorrow’s leader will not only need to set strategy but make sure it’s implemented right. Along the way, he or she had also better be able to develop talent, foster innovation, and model company values. Or else.
The HRI/AMA survey included 1,573 responses from managers and HR experts around the world. It found that the number one driver of changes that will have an impact on leadership is increased global competition, followed by the need to focus on customers, to make sure the organization is operating efficiently and to adapt to the accelerating pace of change.
How are leaders going to adapt? First, they’ll need the right competencies. The survey found that the two most highly ranked leadership competencies, both today and 10 years from now, are strategy development and communication skills. That is, leaders have got to figure out how to deal with global competition and then communicate, communicate, communicate. The ability to execute strategy requires, according to the survey, both flexibility and an openness to change.
The next most highly ranked leadership competencies are related to the development and recruitment of talent and to the fostering of creativity and innovation. In fact, the most impressive shift over the next 10 years is the fact that fostering innovation becomes an even more important competency than talent-related issues. Respondents think that innovation will be an absolute key to staying competitive in a global, fast-paced marketplace.
Then there are two other overarching leadership competencies: Know the business well enough to drive results, and model the values of the organization. This means that leaders must be able to cope with those nitty-gritty business issues on the ground even while modeling the ideals – including the ethics – of the company. What’s more, the ability to model values and show ethical leadership will grow more important over the next 10 years, the survey shows, while the need to know the business will get a bit less important.
So, to review, tomorrow’s leaders – in addition to being excellent strategists and communicators – must be nurturers of creativity, terrific developers and wooers of talent, upholders of corporate values, and drivers of business results. In short, they’ll have to be well-rounded people characterized by a potent mixture of both soft and hard leadership skills, and they’ll need to know just how and when to move from one role to another.
If current trends are any indication, then the leaders who fail initially won’t get a lot of time to recover. The Booz Allen Hamilton annual study of CEO turnover has found that performance-related CEO turnover rates were up by a whopping 300% in 2004 compared with 1995. “Chief executives thus are being treated more in the manner to which other executives and middle managers have long become accustomed: Hit your numbers or hit the road,” reports strategy+business magazine.
To make sure they have the future leaders they need, companies will have to be committed to the development process. The HRI/AMA survey showed that, over the next 10 years, the features of organizational culture with the greatest impact on a firm’s ability to develop leaders will be leadership development strategies, support from top executives, succession planning/talent-pool planning processes, and a recognition that it’s the job of leaders to develop other leaders.
A lot of this seems obvious. Companies can’t develop good leaders without good development strategies. And they can’t do it without leaders who support the process and are positively engaged in it as teachers and mentors. They also can’t do it without planning processes that work.
But knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things. Too often, companies fall victim to the organizational hurdles that keep leadership development programs from being truly top-notch. The HRI/AMA survey asked respondents what they thought were the main barriers to developing leaders. Number one was a lack of measurement of leadership behaviors. As the old management saw goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and that’s as true for leadership as anything else.
The second most highly ranked barrier was inadequate leadership development program content. This is pretty surprising in light of the fact that leadership training and development has been a real growth industry over the last decade. Yet, it appears that money spent does not necessarily equate with good content, maybe because the challenges faced by leaders are themselves morphing as the global market changes.
The next two barriers are a lack of rewards for leadership behaviors and a lack of a supportive culture. This adds up to a pretty gloomy picture – that is, a lot of companies lack the right measurement tools, the right content, and the right culture, including reward systems.
Alignment seems to be a key issue. Some companies need to do a better job of identifying critical leadership competencies and then selecting, developing, assessing and compensating based on those competencies. Of course, the required competencies may change over time, and the whole process has got to be linked to measurable business results. But better alignment can help companies develop the kind of people who will successfully lead their organizations into the future.
The HRI/AMA survey included 1,573 responses from managers and HR experts around the world. It found that the number one driver of changes that will have an impact on leadership is increased global competition, followed by the need to focus on customers, to make sure the organization is operating efficiently and to adapt to the accelerating pace of change.
How are leaders going to adapt? First, they’ll need the right competencies. The survey found that the two most highly ranked leadership competencies, both today and 10 years from now, are strategy development and communication skills. That is, leaders have got to figure out how to deal with global competition and then communicate, communicate, communicate. The ability to execute strategy requires, according to the survey, both flexibility and an openness to change.
The next most highly ranked leadership competencies are related to the development and recruitment of talent and to the fostering of creativity and innovation. In fact, the most impressive shift over the next 10 years is the fact that fostering innovation becomes an even more important competency than talent-related issues. Respondents think that innovation will be an absolute key to staying competitive in a global, fast-paced marketplace.
Then there are two other overarching leadership competencies: Know the business well enough to drive results, and model the values of the organization. This means that leaders must be able to cope with those nitty-gritty business issues on the ground even while modeling the ideals – including the ethics – of the company. What’s more, the ability to model values and show ethical leadership will grow more important over the next 10 years, the survey shows, while the need to know the business will get a bit less important.
So, to review, tomorrow’s leaders – in addition to being excellent strategists and communicators – must be nurturers of creativity, terrific developers and wooers of talent, upholders of corporate values, and drivers of business results. In short, they’ll have to be well-rounded people characterized by a potent mixture of both soft and hard leadership skills, and they’ll need to know just how and when to move from one role to another.
If current trends are any indication, then the leaders who fail initially won’t get a lot of time to recover. The Booz Allen Hamilton annual study of CEO turnover has found that performance-related CEO turnover rates were up by a whopping 300% in 2004 compared with 1995. “Chief executives thus are being treated more in the manner to which other executives and middle managers have long become accustomed: Hit your numbers or hit the road,” reports strategy+business magazine.
To make sure they have the future leaders they need, companies will have to be committed to the development process. The HRI/AMA survey showed that, over the next 10 years, the features of organizational culture with the greatest impact on a firm’s ability to develop leaders will be leadership development strategies, support from top executives, succession planning/talent-pool planning processes, and a recognition that it’s the job of leaders to develop other leaders.
A lot of this seems obvious. Companies can’t develop good leaders without good development strategies. And they can’t do it without leaders who support the process and are positively engaged in it as teachers and mentors. They also can’t do it without planning processes that work.
But knowing what to do and actually doing it are two different things. Too often, companies fall victim to the organizational hurdles that keep leadership development programs from being truly top-notch. The HRI/AMA survey asked respondents what they thought were the main barriers to developing leaders. Number one was a lack of measurement of leadership behaviors. As the old management saw goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and that’s as true for leadership as anything else.
The second most highly ranked barrier was inadequate leadership development program content. This is pretty surprising in light of the fact that leadership training and development has been a real growth industry over the last decade. Yet, it appears that money spent does not necessarily equate with good content, maybe because the challenges faced by leaders are themselves morphing as the global market changes.
The next two barriers are a lack of rewards for leadership behaviors and a lack of a supportive culture. This adds up to a pretty gloomy picture – that is, a lot of companies lack the right measurement tools, the right content, and the right culture, including reward systems.
Alignment seems to be a key issue. Some companies need to do a better job of identifying critical leadership competencies and then selecting, developing, assessing and compensating based on those competencies. Of course, the required competencies may change over time, and the whole process has got to be linked to measurable business results. But better alignment can help companies develop the kind of people who will successfully lead their organizations into the future.