or ‘very confident’ in their ability to meet the four VUCA challenges. The result for Australian leaders was in line with their global counterparts. To succeed, leaders of today and tomorrow will need a diverse mix of soft skills and technical business skills. In Development Beyond Learning’s latest book, The Leader’s Edge, these skills are summarised under the acronym, SMART: ITUATIONAL UNDERSTANDING. A leader begins by assessing where they are as an organisation and then where they need to move to in three main areas: people, purpose and performance. “It’s understanding the current situation and where you personally fit into that, and how the rest of your team sits in relation to those elements,” explains Gary Lear, chairman and co-founder, L &D consultants Development Beyond Learning (DBL).
S
OTIVATING. “With all the challenges
M that are placed on a leader’s head, one
of the most important factors is the ability to motivate themselves and then motivating others to create a high performing team,” Lear explains. DVANCING GOALS. “Taking a business forwards is not just about behavioural leadership but how you set a great strategy. Setting a great strategy and vision is important for the organisation, and advancing goals is based on that strategy and vision,” says Lear.
A
LEADERS TODAY are faced with challenges that have not been witnessed before, and these challenges will only escalate in the next 10-20 years. Leadership consultants DDI groups these challenges into four key categories: VUCA. • Volatility – anticipating and reacting to the nature and speed of change • Uncertainty – acting decisively without 100% clear direction and certainty • Complexity – navigating through complexity, chaos, and confusion • Ambiguity – maintaining effectiveness despite constant surprises and a lack of predictability. Less than two-thirds of leaders around the globe said they were either ‘highly confident’
R
EVIEWING ACTIONS. “The leader must be able to place things in context in their organisation and within their global focus. They must then be able to move people
and their people structures forwards to adapt to any upcoming changes,” says Lear.
T
RACKING PROGRESS. “This means consistently reviewing your own leadership and your organisation’s progress,” says Lear. “One of the biggest problems we get into is almost like a treadmill of doing the same thing every day and expecting a different result. Leaders need to start looking at tracking progress so they can bring about change quickly within their organisation.”
Are we prepared? If these external challenges are daunting, it’s nothing compared to what organisations are up against internally. Over the last five years, Lear has seen a contraction of focus on leadership development within organisations. This, he notes, is a ripple effect of the GFC, which focused most CEOs on the bottom line rather than people development. “The challenge we’ve got right now is getting the CEO’s eyes off the bottom line and onto their people. One of the problems is they don’t realise that their people are their organisation. They are creating a leadership capability gap which is going to be hard to fill,” he says. Part of the problem is a failure to map out explicit career opportunities and paths to upcoming leaders. In the past, individuals could enter an organisation and comfortably spend the next 20 years working their way through a relatively static and defined career path. In today’s VUCA world, this doesn’t work. Organisations are constantly changing and reshaping their structures. This can make it challenging to map out well-defined career paths over a long period of time.
PREPARING FOR VUCA CHALLENGES Percentage of HR professionals who report that leaders are incapable of meeting the challenges of…
40%
32%
36%
31%
Volatility
Uncertainty
Complexity
Ambiguity
Source: The Global Leadership Forecast, 2014/15, DDI/The Conference Board
www.hcamag.com
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