Developing
21st-Century Leadership Skills BY ADAM CANWELL, VISHALLI DONGRIE, NEIL NEVERAS, AND HEATHER STOCKTON
Developing leaders is a major human capital need in today’s organizations. Companies face an urgent need to develop leaders at all levels, including bringing younger leaders online faster, developing leaders globally, and keeping senior leaders relevant and engaged longer.
Twenty-first-century leadership is different from that of earlier generations. Companies face new leadership challenges, including developing millennials and multiple generations of leaders, meeting the demand for leaders with global fluency and flexibility, building the ability to innovate and inspire others to perform, and acquiring new levels of understanding of rapidly changing technologies and new disciplines and fields. For companies around the world, a shortage of leaders is one of the biggest impediments to growth. This challenge is particularly acute today as the global recovery strengthens, companies seek to rapidly grow their businesses in new markets, and older leaders begin to retire at accelerating rates. The executives in our 2014 global survey viewed leadership as the highest-priority issue of all those we asked them about. Yet, despite the acknowledged importance of leadership, most companies believe they are not meeting the challenge (see Figure 1). 38
American Management Association
MWORLD FALL 2014
GRAPHIC: DELOITTE UNIVERSITY PRESS I DUPRESS.COM
Leadership remains the number-one talent issue facing organizations around the world. In Deloitte’s 2014 Human Capital Trends survey, 86% of respondents rated it as “urgent” or “important.” But only 13% of respondents said they do an excellent job of developing leaders at all levels—the largest “readiness gap” in our 2014 survey.