The way that we define leaders is changing. More than half of our participants defined leaders not by their position within an organisational chart, but by their degree of influence and performance. As organisations become less hierarchical, flatter and more matrixed, employees find themselves needing greater leadership and collaborative skills for working and sharing across business units and geographical borders, and adapting to ad-hoc project work.
Best practice
One best in class Top Employer is EY South Africa (see interview in the full report) who have focused on developing the next generation of global leaders. Central to this was to develop a mindset in which learning, experiences and coaching were actively sought out to expand and enrich the scope of an individual’s thinking, capabilities and perspectives on what it meant to be a leader. The programme was designed around leadership challenges focused on markets, business and people, with participants identified for behaviours and capabilities, and exposure given to a wide range of domestic and International work challenges.
Create a diverse pool of future leaders
A feature of such an approach will often be exposure to more varied work-related challenges outside of the participant’s usual remit and comfort zone. This would give a broader understanding of wider business and market issues, and additionally a focus on global communication skills - including presentations, to help strengthen the ability to articulate issues and proposals to senior stakeholders. A programme such as this can help to create a more diverse pool of future leaders, with broader experience. This broader definition of leadership also correlates to higher market performance. Global Top Performers differentiate themselves by placing an emphasis on improving their candidate pools and strength of leadership pipeline, which helps to give them a higher proportion of internal candidates for key management and executive positions.
The weakest overall global performances were for using leadership development programmes to transform future leaders into change agents, and to support them through change programmes. Global certified top performers, and large multinational
organisations overall, performed slightly lower than the average. This is certainly interesting, given that organisational agility is often seen as a differentiator in the global commercial marketplace.
Six key trends
'Defining leaders by influence' is one of the six key trends we have identified in the Leadership Development report. These six trends are shaping the future of Leadership Development and influencing the approach of many global businesses.
Each trend signals a move towards a more collaborative, collective and inclusive approach at a business level, while also placing more responsibility and decision making in the hands of the individual to self determine their own development.
Download the full Leadership Development report to learn all about the current trends in Leadership Development and how organisations deal with these trends in their business processes.
