THE CRISIS OF LEADERSHIP
Because I do my best thinking out loud, I’ve chosen to record a video about an idea that I believe is important for you to consider.
So please do take a few minutes to watch.
TRANSCRIPTION
Hi, it’s Stacey here and I want to talk to you today about something that I’ve been thinking, a lot about, which is the growing crisis in leadership.
Now we know that there are some great leaders, really good examples of leadership culture and that sort of thing, but there’s also not enough of that.
The expectations of leadership have changed, particularly over the last five or six years. And that’s to include that really human element on top of all of the traditional aspects of leadership, if you like, which is around delivering outcomes and meeting financial requirements and that sort of thing. But now we have this human aspect which is everything from sort of the social influence and the economic responsibility, to how we treat the people in our care and whom we serve.
I think there’s a growing recognition that continuing to do things in the same way is really building in your own irrelevance. The world changes so quickly, and will continue to do so, that we need to continue to elevate the level of leadership, the practice of leadership.
We also know that talent is a challenge. A lot of people have left the workforce who perhaps had great leadership knowledge, skill and capability. And people are making different choices around their careers these days, which means that we may not have the same robustness in our leadership talent pipelines.
In fact, we know that we don’t. And there’s a lot of research around how many organisations actually do have robust leadership talent pipelines. It’s not very high, maybe about 11%. And that’s the ability to have people ready to step into the next leadership role across all of your leadership roles in an organisation.
So, I think we’re kind of approaching this crisis.
We don’t have enough good leaders and we’re not growing enough good leaders, who can really contribute on this higher level of expectation of what leadership really is and the difference that it makes to us in our day to day work and life, but also you, to industries and economies and the world overall.
You just need to look at some of the areas of conflict, challenges and problem that we have on a global scale, whether they’re political or economic. There’s just so much, you know what they are. And, so I believe that we are in a period where we have a growing crisis of leadership, not enough good leaders to keep the world on the right kind of trajectory.
This brings me back to the responsibility of leadership and in particular Big Leadership, really expanding our perspective on what it means to be a leader and the role that we must play in cultivating great leadership.
We throw people into leadership roles without preparing them. We throw them into the next most senior role without preparing them. We give them a one day course or something like that. We’re not thinking big enough.
Our leaders, in order to really realise their great potential as leaders, need more support. Not only that, we need a bigger pool of potential leaders. I think we approach this in a way that is too small.
We see organisations with high potential talent that they earmark and give extra opportunities to. Everybody in our employee and people pool has the potential to lead in some way and I think we need to focus on equipping more of our people with those universal leadership skills that will allow them to contribute as leaders in their own way. And some of them will, yes, go into hierarchical leadership roles and be ready for that. More of them hopefully will be able to step into those roles.
So I think there’s a couple of things that I wanted to leave you with.
If we continue on the trajectory that we have, we will have less equipped leaders and fewer of them who are able to really make the kind of leadership contribution that the world needs to create a positive, world of possibility, the one that we want to live in. Where we’re all proactively creating a future that we want to be part of.
And I think we just don’t throw the net wide enough.
> It concerns me that not enough leaders are stepping up to grow more leaders.
> It concerns me that we’re not considering more people as potential leaders.
> It concerns me that we don’t offer the right kind of support.
> And it concerns me that we continue to make the mistakes that we’ve made historically rather than doing different and more to support our people.
To, at the very minimum, lead self. But of course we want them to also be equipped to lead ideas, to be leaders within their team, to lead portfolios of work and perhaps to lead other people as well, and organisations.
We need to do more and different ourselves, which means we have to continue growing as leaders.
And, I’m just not seeing enough of it to convince me that we are going to be in a good place in a few years time.
So I would love for you to really have some thought about this, about what you can do.
- What are the steps that you can take?
- What’s the legacy that you can leave in the leadership space?
Because otherwise we are all going to suffer from the crisis of leadership.
I’d love to know your thoughts.
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