What's Changing? - Leadership

Please see below selected recent leadership-related change:

See also:

W hat's New? - Leadership

May 2024

A study found that a CEO’s level of narcissism is linked to greater narcissism within the company’s top management team. The researchers also discovered a small, but statistically significant link between top management team narcissism and executive turnover. Turnover among leadership can be disruptive for companies. Overall, there can be both benefits and consequences to having lots of narcissistic personalities in the C-suite. Competition between executives can boost performance and innovation, but also create conflict and lead to risky decision-making.

November 2023

It's often thought that the best leaders need to be extroverts or outgoing. However, many experts say that is not the case. While extroverted leaders have important strengths, they also tend to command the centre of attention and take over discussions. Thoughtful communication and critical thinking are two important leadership traits associated with introverts. In a dynamic, unpredictable environment, these are the qualities that the most effective leaders may need to possess.

October 2023

CEO pay has soared 1,209.2% since 1978 compared with a 15.3% rise in typical workers’ pay in the US.

July 2023

In Leader as Healer, Nicholas Janni explored the need for a new style of leadership in the changing world of work. Conventional leadership, focused on maximising profits, made relationships transactional. In the current climate where organisations face unprecedented challenges, the author advocated for a more authentic approach to leadership. Being present, creating safe spaces for colleagues to acknowledge emotions at work and practising mindfulness are the key pillars of a holistic leadership style, Janni claimed.

December 2022

Further reading:

July 2022

Gallup research with over 10,000 employees in non-leader roles indicated that what followers need most in a leader is trust, compassion, stability and hope. Leaders who inspire those four things have a comparatively higher proportion of engaged customers, higher productivity and higher profitability.

June 2022

Further reading:
- How can you make the leap into leadership? - LinkedIn
- Leadership lessons from the world’s best CEOs - McKinsey

November 2021

Bosses joined the Great Reshuffle put in motion by the pandemic, according to Axios. The number of chief executives signing onto new public companies in markets around the world jumped to 76 in the first half of 2021 - the most by far since executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles began keeping records.

September 2021

In Gardeners Not Mechanics, change consultant Gary Lloyd argued that gardeners cannot predict or control their environments. They must balance art and science, proceed through trial and error, then nourish and support their crop. Leaders seeking to effect change in their organisations face similarly unpredictable and interdependent environments they can only influence, not control. The author describes the strategic planning, preparing, planting, pruning, weeding, staking and watering leaders must perform to drive sustained change.
Evidence suggests that a boss’s competence is the greatest influence on employees’ job satisfaction and it predicts individual performance and retention. Workplaces also need a diverse range of experts. If we do not see anyone like us in charge, we are unlikely to enter the leadership pipeline. And if you do not have diversity in the middle, you will never have it at the top. A UK study found that the gender pay gap closes when the share of female managers in the workplace rises. This is because women’s wages are more likely to go up under a female boss, while men’s decline, noted the FT.

April 2021

The global pandemic accelerated long-standing trends, bringing the nature and characteristics of the future successful enterprise into finer resolution. Evolving the DNA of the future enterprise will require CEOs to close key capability and execution gaps as well as embrace a mindset of continuous transformation. To realise sustainable competitive advantage CEOs must embrace three interconnected value drivers: humans at the centre, technology at speed and innovation at scale, argued EY.

March 2021

Research suggested that "ambiverts" - those who have qualities of both introverts and extroverts - are most equipped to succeed. Leadership requires moments of listening and reflection, along with moments of enthusiasm and boldness. But how do you develop both qualities at once? A report in BBC Worklife said knowing where you fall on the spectrum is key before then taking steps to become more of the other.

November 2020

Occupying a leadership position is not the same thing as leading, warned Harvard Business Review, adding that, to lead, you must be able to connect, motivate, and inspire a sense of ownership of shared objectives. Heightening your capacity to lead others requires being able to see how you think and act, and how your behavior affects others. Leading well requires a continuous journey of personal development. Yet people in leadership roles often eschew the long and challenging work of deepening self-insight in favor of chasing after management “tools”— preferably the “quick ’n’ easy” kind, such as personality type assessments that reduce employees to a few simplistic behavioral tendencies

August 2020

EY noted that, for chief operating officers, business is no longer usual. Chief marketing officers saw consumer habits flip, virtually overnight. Chief revenue officers are trying to mitigate risk and build trust in a highly volatile environment. Chief executive officers are juggling business survival with employee safety, and unremitting pressure from investors and other stakeholders. And most are doing it in front of laptops, using video conferencing. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the world in ways big and small, from back offices to boardrooms, across industries and geographies.

May 2020

When business conditions change as dramatically as they did in 2020, CEOs need to be able to rely on their best leaders to adapt quickly. But what should they do when their strongest executives seem unable to play a new game? The costs - organisational drift, missed opportunities, unaddressed threats - are so big that it’s tempting to replace leaders who are suffering from paralysis. But McKinsey believes this is a mistake when, as is often the case, these executives possess valuable assets, such as superior market knowledge, relationships, and organisational savvy, that are difficult to replace.

March 2020

The US Project Management Institute reported by 2020 90% of project teams now included one or, often, more workers who operate from different locations than their supervisors and teammates. Nearly 80% of managers now supervise a worker or workers at remote locations. Many leaders face isolation because their team members are far away. These “long-distance leaders” need to use a variety of tools specifically designed to address distance leadership issues and concerns. The Long-Distance Leader argues in response that remote leadership’s fundamental rule is that leadership always matters more than location. The principles of leadership don’t change, but the leadership techniques will differ. Long-distance leaders and remote workers must routinely seek objective feedback.

December 2018

Most leaders don’t mean to waste their employees’ time. Unfortunately, many of them heap unnecessary work on the people below them in the pecking order - and, according to The Wall Street Journal - are downright clueless that they’re doing it. They give orders without realising how much work those directives entail. They make offhand comments and don’t consider that their employees may interpret them as commands. And they solicit opinions without realising that people will bend over backward to tell them what they want to hear - rather than the whole truth, warts and all.
A wealth of research shows that female leaders, much more than their male counterparts, face the need to be warm and nice (what society traditionally expects from women), as well as competent or tough (what society traditionally expects from men and leaders). The problem is that these qualities are often seen as opposites. This creates a “catch-22” and “double bind” for women leaders, warned Harvard Business Review.
As with business, the nature of the CEO’s role is changing all the time, and there are indications that a stronger marketing focus may be required from the CEOs of the future. Executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles found the proportion of European chief executives with a marketing background grew from 15 per cent to 21 per cent between 2011 and 2015.
Further reading:

November 2018

According to What Are Your Blind Spots? by Jim Haudan and Rich Berens, statistics suggest that about 70% of employees suffer disengagement from their jobs. Unfortunately, many leaders have no idea how to engage their employees, often because of insidious “blind spots” in their thinking. These faulty management ideas rest on inaccurate information masquerading as business philosophies, and they’re destructively resistant to facts.

Pre 2018

May 2016

For INSEAD, the way that CEOs create, convey, and manage energy throughout the organisation can mean the difference between delivering high performance and constantly missing targets. By “energy,” INSEAD does not mean personality, passion, charisma, extroversion, cheerleading, or any of the other characteristics that are mistakenly attributed to it. Energy is related to - but different from- strategic focus, time management, and personal rituals, such as workouts and scheduled downtime. It is less about energetic action and more about authenticity, character, discipline, and communication.

Deloitte’s business confidence report revealed that top leaders, chief executive officers and chief executives-in-waiting in the US, the latter including those who are next in line to the C-suite, have a very high level of confidence despite global volatility. Results show 69 percent of CEOs and 56 percent of CEOs in waiting feel very confident they will outperform the competition in the next year, compared to 66 percent of CXOs and 63 percent of CXOWs in 2014. However, some doubts are emerging as executives, particularly those just outside the C-suite, struggle with how to transform their businesses and disrupt their industries in an unstable and increasingly competitive marketplace.

Boards often think the person in the corner office doesn’t need more development, but this couldn’t be further than the truth, claimed INSEAD. To prevent CEOs from flaming out in the top job, they should build frameworks to help them learn. Companies spend a fortune developing high potential executives. The global executive education market is valued at $70 billion a year, but CEOs don’t get much of a look in. Investing in CEO development is typically considered a low priority for boards who think that by the time someone has reached the pinnacle of the organisation, he or she ought to be the finished article. Accountability for development falls to HR and they spend their resources investing in rising executives, not established ones.

April 2016

A Dartmouth professor, writing in the Harvard Business Review, found that there is one thing that distinguishes business icons from their equally famous peers: the ability to groom talent. They didn’t just build organisations; they spotted, trained, and developed a future generation of leaders. They belong in a category beyond superstars: superbosses. The professor reviewed thousands of articles and books and conducted more than 200 interviews. He then looked for patterns- common tastes, proclivities, behaviours - anything that might help explain why these people were able to propel not only their companies but also their protégés to such great heights. He found that superbosses share a number of key personality traits: they are extremely confident, competitive, and imaginative. They also act with integrity and aren’t afraid to let their authentic selves shine through, and more interesting still were the similarities he saw in the “people strategies” that superbosses employed.

March 2016

INSEAD argued that, in today’s business environment of racing competition and the increasing complexities of management, leaders are frequently finding themselves having to do seemingly opposite things at once. ‘Paradoxical management’ often relates to how leaders act – their ability, for example, to focus on short-term and long term goals, or cost-cutting and investment in innovation. But it can also refer to their psychological behaviour. Recent research examined leaders who were narcissistic yet humble (two seemingly oxymoronic traits) and found that not only could the two apparently contradictory personal attributes exist simultaneously in the same leader, but narcissistic executives who were able to temper, or counter-balance, their self-centered egocentricity with humility often proved to be superior leaders.

When one thinks of great leaders, certain characteristics come to mind: they have confidence in their abilities and conviction in their beliefs. They “trust their gut,” “stay the course,” and “prove others wrong.” They aren’t “pushovers,” and they certainly don’t “flip-flop.” But this archetype is terribly outdated, argued the Harvard Business Review. Many of the world’s most successful leaders have one surprising thing they have in common: a willingness to be persuaded, being sceptical of their own opinions and being willing to seek out information that might disprove their beliefs about the world and themselves. In our increasingly complex world, these leaders have realised that the ability to consider emerging evidence and change their minds accordingly provides extraordinary advantages.

February 2016

The leadership challenge for 2016 will continue to be the pace of global change and the rate at which technology changes, argued Forbes. The two are a cruelly matched pair that will forever challenge any leader’s judgement and decision-making, as both significantly impact a company’s scalability, the timeframe to scale and the value it delivers along the spectrum of its growth. The secret to overcoming challenges is to anticipate them to the point that their inherent complexity is minimised. This means getting ahead of the power curve rather than looking at it from the low ground—something too many organisational leaders delay until it’s too late.

Human capital related strategies dominate CEOs’ plans to address the top business challenges they face, according to the Conference Board, beginning with continual development to enhance the employee value proposition. Leaders must master these strategies in order to drive business growth through a culture of innovation, inclusion, and engagement.

January 2016

PwC's annual global CEO survey this year saw the highest UK participation in a decade. Over 100 UK CEOs have shared their views with us on the key challenges facing them and their businesses in 2016. One continuing theme for us and the CEOs we spoke to is how to build trust in business. Here Dr Nigel Wilson, CEO of Legal & General, shares his thoughts on how this can be achieved. Finally, read our latest blog on what CEOs tell us are the top eight contributions business makes to society, that they believe are currently under recognised – namely employment, prosperity, innovation, education and training, environmental protection, security and wellbeing, critical infrastructure, and charitable giving.

December 2015

In 'A Leader’s Guide to “Always-On” Transformation' Boston Consulting Group argued that, for leaders in large corporations, business today often feels like being on a steep treadmill with the speed control set to max. Three months ago, the company may have finished a cost-reduction transformation to remove management layers and streamline operations. Before it is even clear that the changes have taken root, a disruption in Asia requires implementing a new go-to-market model for several countries. And right around the corner is another large-scale transformation effort, using new digital technology to improve the delivery of services and tap new revenue streams.

A recent study from MIT Sloan Management Review (SMR) and Deloitte, Strategy, Not Technology, Drives Digital Transformation indicates that employees across all age groups want to work for digital leaders. This finding from the fourth annual digital trends research study conducted in collaboration between MIT SMR and Deloitte, is meaningful because the study also shows that companies advancing further along their digital journey aren’t focused exclusively on the technologies themselves, but instead on core business principles of strategy, culture, and leadership.

November 2015

In 'The Fall of the Alpha Leader', a CEO argued that modern life is too fast and complex for powerful individuals to save the day, that the idea of the heroic individual is a fantasy and explained why the most successful businesses are adopting radical new organisational structures.

Shaping Tomorrow claimed that there is a growing concern among many leaders that a startup is going to come from nowhere and "do an Uber" to their business model, and that four in 10 incumbent leaders across all industries will fall victim to the "digital vortex" in the next five years. Focusing less on control and more on leadership is something CIOs will need to do when looking at making inroads into the world of the Internet.

Sometimes the key to turning a business around lies in changing the actions of those who work in it. Management consultants have been using behavioural and organisational psychologists to help analyse leadership and workplace behaviour for decades. Now, however, they are turning to a new breed of expert on human behaviour - the neuroscientist. Deloitte has just launched a leadership consulting practice which will use the expertise of Kaisen Consulting, a boutique firm of business psychologists that Deloitte acquired in September. Deloitte's Leadership Consulting head said that while the company draws on psychology for many insights, findings emerging from neuroscience add valuable knowledge and scientific rigour.

Most common leadership development methods are often considered to be the least effective by those in the organisation implementing them, according to new research by Mercer. Respondents to Mercer's 2015 Leadership Survey recognised on-the-job experiences such as stretch assignments, rotational experiences and overseas assignments as the top three most effective methods for development. However, they also state that these methods are used just as often as face-to-face and online learning - the two methods identified as the least effective.

October 2015

In 20 Questions for Business Leaders, strategy+business argued that the entire history of management ideas can be seen as a series of answers to a few pragmatic queries. People who succeed in organisations tend to be pragmatic problem solvers. They have to be, because of the myriad challenges they face. How to grow the enterprise. How to get work done. How to find customers. How to be themselves in the workplace. And so on. Because there are no easy answers to these complex problems, they test the answers by starting a company, launching a project, or making a move.

In Bridging the Disconnect between Leadership Theory and Practice, strategy+business reported on a Stanford business school professor who lambasts the leadership development industry - including business schools, human resource departments, authors, and leadership programmes and coaches - for being clueless about the harsh political realities of the workplace, and for promoting behaviours that are aspirational rather than practical.

According to the Financial Times, organisations are starting to develop the more collaborative approach, sometimes called “responsive leadership”, which listens to the audience, senses their potential appetite for new things that to offer them. The next generation has the ambition and the tools to accelerate these changes. They want to work in organisations that have a far flatter structure, in which leaders genuinely care about the people who are following them.

Harvard Business Review ranks CEOs against measures of enduring success, tracking and analying each CEO’s performance starting from day one of his or her tenure. HBR's goal is to get beyond the most recent quarterly or even annual results and truly evaluate long-term performance. In the past, however, its ranking was based exclusively on hard stock market numbers. It looked at total shareholder return, as well as the change in each company’s market capitalisation. HBR liked the fact that the ranking was based solidly on data and not on reputation or anecdote. Yet it also felt incomplete, because it failed to account for the many aspects of leadership that go beyond mere market performance. And so this year HBR has tweaked things, by adding a measurement of each company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. For this, HBR relied on the calculations of the investment research firm Sustainalytics; it now weighs long-term financial results at 80% and ESG performance at 20%.

September 2015

Lack of sufficient leadership talent is a top issue currently facing 86% of HR and business leaders, according to Deloitte’s “Southeast Asia Human Capital Trends 2015: Leading in the New World of Work” report. All respondents reported that leadership was at least somewhat important to their business. However, the majority of organisations are still struggling to develop a pipeline of leadership talent. This current struggle jeopardises future growth.

Deloitte announced the launch of a new leadership consulting practice. The practice will recruit 700 people across Deloitte’s network of member firms by 2020. The launch coincides with Deloitte UK’s acquisition of the business and assets of Kaisen Consulting Limited, UK a boutique leadership consultancy of business psychologists. Kaisen employs over 60 people, including 30 occupational psychologists based in the UK and US. It has 25 years’ experience working with senior leaders in more than 40 countries. Combining Deloitte’s current leadership consulting research and experience with Kaisen’s market leading assessment methodology, IP, and tools, the new practice will target the global leadership services market, estimated to be worth over $40bn a year.

See also: Go North: Lost Leader from strategy+business.

August 2015

See Thinking Like a Leader: Three Big Shifts and Why leaders Need to Ask from strategy+business.

July 2015

According to The Conference Board CEO Challenge 2015: Creating Opportunity out of Adversity—Building Innovative, People-Driven Organizations, senior executives are interested in operational excellence, customer relationships, innovation, sustainability, as well as the talent to get them there. Human capital remains CEOs’ No. 1 Challenge. Yet, the July/August 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review contends that “It’s time to blow up HR and build something new.” In other words, HR still doesn’t get it. In large part, HR continues to fail to align human capital investments with business needs, missing the opportunity to contribute to the interests of executives, including operational excellence, customer relationships, innovation, and sustainability.

The outstanding companies identified in Aon Hewitt's Top Companies for Leaders study were found to have the edge that supports and enhances leadership and leads to great organisational performance. Top companies: 1. Have self-aware leaders who understand their personal strengths and weaknesses, and use this information to become more effective leaders of others. 2. Build resilience in their leaders through stretch experiences, encouragement and support for taking risks in innovating, learning from failing quickly, and exposure to multiple perspectives and ideas and 3. Identify and build engaged leaders who connect strongly with their people, who connect their teams more strongly with the organisation’s purpose and mission, who are both mobilisers and stabilisers, and who are ambidextrous influencers who can appeal as needed both to minds and to hearts.

With a focus on companies over US$500m in revenue, KPMG's Global CEO Outlook involved global businesses discussing complex issues: strategy, growth, market disruption, innovation, cybersecurity, talent and transformation. The results, for KPMG, are eye-opening: while many CEOs are confident in the global economy and the three year growth outlook of their companies, many recognise they need to transform their businesses if they are to survive and prosper. In order to do so, however, big businesses need to be willing to take bigger risks, as success in a world of constant disruption takes leadership with strategic vision.

A new strategy+business article argued that, while companies can significantly influence the media visibility of their CEO with certain kinds of press releases — but having a prominent CEO can also work to shareholders’ detriment.

June 2015

According to Deloitte, organisations today must navigate a “new world of work”- one that requires a dramatic change in strategies for leadership, talent, and human resources. In this new world of work, the barriers between work and life have been all but eliminated. Employees are "always on" - hyperconnected to their jobs through pervasive mobile technology. Networking tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Glassdoor enable people to easily monitor the market for new job opportunities. Details about an organisation’s culture are available at the tap of a screen, providing insights about companies to employees and potential employees alike. The balance of power in the employer-employee relationship has shifted—making today’s employees more like customers or partners than subordinates.

The number of chief executive officers who were dismissed from their jobs at large global companies fell to a record low in 2014, found the Harvard Business Review. At first glance that might suggest complacency on the part of boards of directors, but it’s actually good news about corporate governance in general and CEO succession planning in particular. For HBR, it means that boards are doing a better job of choosing top leaders - far better than they were doing a decade ago. Data for the world’s largest 2,500 companies also suggests that better CEO succession practices are converging around the world, as regional differences in CEO succession rates have narrowed sharply in recent years.

May 2015

Chief executive pay is a scandal, according to the Financial Times, which claimed that it is too high, too complicated and has badly damaged the image of business, with even fervent defenders of free markets thinking top pay is out of control.

Reports from McKinsey and PwC painted a very bleak picture of C-suite succession practices in today’s corporations, noted the Harvard Business Review. According to McKinsey's survey of 1,195 executives, nearly half of those who had ascended to top-level positions in their firms said they were unable to align colleagues around the goals they set out in the new role, while more than a third admitted that they had failed to meet those initial objectives. PwC, meanwhile, calculated the economic cost of large global companies getting their most important C-suite appointment - CEO - wrong: well over $100 billion.

April 2015

The Managing Partners' Forum, a professional body that celebrates the value of leadership and management excellence, named Grant Thornton as having the Best Programme for Leadership Development at its 2015 awards. Judged by an independent panel of subject matter experts, the award recognises the management team whose programme combines a clear analysis of leadership requirements with innovative interventions.

The latest from strategy+business included two new articles on leadership: Learning from the Persuasive Genius of Great Leaders and 6 Ways to Challenge Your Leadership Assumptions.

March 2015

Companies with strong leadership and talent management practices increase their revenues 2.2 times faster and their profits 1.5 times faster than companies with weak practices, according to a survey of more than 1,260 companies conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The survey quantified the business payoff that companies can expect from improving their leadership and talent management capabilities. The BCG Global Leadership and Talent Index also quantifies the revenue and profit gains that companies can expect from moving up the index.

Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2015 report indicated a continuing lack of progress in addressing what has become a perennial organisational challenge: leadership. In today’s competitive business environment and rapidly evolving world of work, organisations should continuously develop a robust portfolio of leaders who are ready to engage employees, push forward growth strategies, drive innovation, and work directly with customers. Companies that fail to invest continuously in the leaders of tomorrow may find themselves falling behind their competitors.

February 2015

According to the latest Workforce 2020 research from Oxford Economics, sponsored by SAP, only 44% of executives believe their leadership teams are capable of driving and effectively managing change. Worse yet, just over 33% claim they are prepared to lead a diverse workforce and drive global growth. And it’s not just the leaders who are hypercritical of the state of leadership today – the majority of their workforce (56%) share these same negative perceptions.

In How to Lead in Ambiguous Times, the president of Eurasia Group argued that stability, resilience, and relationships are the keys to thriving amid geopolitical crises. Ian Bremmer believes that leaders who can’t be fully agile in ambiguous times, can at least be a steward of their organisation. Be stable, resilient, and networked enough to succeed, Bremmer advises, and remember that if the environment is particularly dire, sometimes simply not ceding ground as one recalibrates for the future is a victory in and of itsel

January 2015

The World Economic Forum warned that, all around the world, women are too often absent in the top tiers of business, academia, politics and finance. Women are not well represented politically. They hold only 21.9% of positions in national parliaments worldwide.

According to INSEAD, the average tenure of a Fortune 500 CEO is about 4.6 years (compared with all CEOs at 8.6). Secondly, a study by Luo, Kanuri & Andrews suggests that long tenure can actually hurt a company’s performance. After the initial rush of enthusiasm and energy, established routines and networks can take over the drive for innovation. It concurs with previous studies on the importance of CEO succession and how new CEOs are more open, inclusive and search for new solutions According to Professor Luo and his team, the optimal tenure for a CEO is 4.8 years. A look at the more successful CEOs, and one can see that they quit while they are ahead.

December 2014

Corporate boards of directors are increasingly reaching down below the second layer of management to name new chief executive officers, found the Boston Consulting Group. By accelerating the promotion of these executives, boards hope that the new CEOs’ ability to understand and act upon signals in today’s unpredictable environment will more than offset their relative inexperience. Many of these new CEOs were only in their thirties when they were appointed.

Leading up - helping those above to lead well and achieve what we all want (namely, success for the enterprise) - is a critical skill for all employees, including executives at the top of the company pyramid, argued the Harvard Business Review. In an earlier era, CEOs were at the apex, accountable to no one. But as investors have become more powerful and boards more sovereign, CEOs have had to learn to manage not just downward through the ranks of their companies, but also up.

Korn Ferry, the recruiter, published its list of the top 15 “most in-demand executive positions for 2015”. All but one are chiefs of some description, with the top five headed by commercial, innovation, digital, cyber security and sustainability officers. Among the other roles, Korn Ferry singles out chief executive officers who, it points out, “are always in demand”, partly because they are the rare generalists making sense of the world for their teams of specialists. However, the FT believes the “chief” designation can be a handicap in this respect.

November 2014

Deloitte has identified six key leadership traits including: curiosity, courage, perseverance, integrity, confidence, and empathy. Some of these traits may be innate - some of our interviewees expressed the belief that they were born with a particular trait - while other traits were developed over time, forged in the crucibles of critical moments and relationships.

Encouraging gender and age diversity in leaders has many benefits for an organisation; it injects more varied perspectives and greater range of thought, decision making, and problem solving. But new research from DDI and The Conference Board highlights a critical difference between the top and bottom corporate financial performers: companies with higher percentages of women in leadership roles perform better. The percentage of millennials in leadership roles also affects overall business success.

Hay Group's Best Companies for Leadership 2014 asked: what makes a great leader, in an ever-more globalised, unpredictable world? Over 17,000 people from more than 2,100 organisations worldwide responded to the survey, and they confirmed there’ll be a definite shift in what the best companies need from their leaders in the next 10-15 years. The best in class say they’ll need leaders with much stronger customer focus, global expertise, a huge capacity to manage complexity, the ability to drive innovation, and a truly collaborative approach – while remaining agile and poised to maximise opportunities. Currently, the emphasis is more on day-to-day performance - executing strategy, making decisions, and teamwork.

October 2014

An HBR article argued that a leadership institute should reflect a company’s leadership ideals. Establishing a corporate university is a big deal. It is a statement you are making to employees about the company’s willingness to invest in talent. It is an expression of a company’s ideal for leadership excellence. So being clear about what the corporate university stands for is an essential starting point.

August 2014

INSEAD argued that the same way a doctor would seek to discover the underlying cause of an illness before prescribing medication, overcoming challenges to leadership effectiveness also requires a deeper examination of root causes of problems. From the structures we operate within our own inner selves, there are many hurdles that can impair a leader’s performance. Identifying those hurdles and devising an action plan to overcome them are the first steps to becoming a high-impact leader.

July 2014

Harvard Business Review compiled a dataset in which they asked 332,860 bosses, peers, and subordinates what skills have the greatest impact on a leader’s success. The skills people reported needing depended not only on their level in the organisation but also on the job they held and their particular circumstances. But even so, there was a remarkable consistency in the data about which skills were perceived as most important in all four levels of the organisation measured. The same competencies - e.g. inspiring others, displaying integrity, solving problems - were selected as most important for the supervisors, middle managers, and senior managers alike, and six out of the seven topped the list for top executives. Executives at every organizational level, our respondents reported, need a balance of these competencies. The other nine competencies included in the study were chosen only half as frequently as the top seven.

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