Leadership Needed—By 2015
by Miki Saxon
How do you feel when you read something presented as a unique insight into a subject and it turns out to be the same old tire stuff that you’ve seen for years?
That’s how I felt when I read The Coming Leadership Gap: What You Can Do About It by John Ryan, president of the Center for Creative Leadership.
I’ve been hearing the term ‘leadership gap’ for years, yet Ryan writes that his company just coined it.
Based on our [global] survey, there are four skills that executives all over the world believe will be most important just five years from now: leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment, and managing change.
Most important starting 2015?
Good grief, I haven’t done a survey, but I’d say those four skills have been important for decades hundreds of years, more actually.
I’m sure Attila the Hun found them critical when he conquered the known world. In fact, odds are that they were on the mind of the first Cro-Magnon clan chieftain when he fought his neighbor.
Pity our poor world when the people running global enterprise think they have five years before they need to master these skills.
One of the comments was especially perceptive; in part it said,
Various management gurus from the 1950’s have said the same thing over and over again. Yet despite this each generation of corporate leaders repeat the mistakes off their predecessors in that they fail to invest in leadership and management development. I believe the answer lies firstly in a change of mindset. –John Coxon
Now we are getting somewhere.
It’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™); it’s always been MAP and it will always be MAP that is the problem—or the solution.
Before and after 2015 it will be the executives and managers who get it; who understand that these skills need to be embedded in the company’s DNA; they are not CEO skills, but core competency requirements to thrive in the 21st Century.
Image credit: hikingartist.com on flickr
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