Leadership Development – Hottest Ticket in Town?

Can U2 be considered the greatest band ever?

Who would you pick as your choice for the best British band ever? Many people would go with the Beatles or Queen, as both revolutionised popular music. A few would argue for Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones, but I reckon that in the end the Beatles would come out on top. The best American band is a much tougher call. There are arguments for Aerosmith, Beach Boys or The Doors- and some might make a case for Nirvana or Pearl Jam.

Global rock bands like these have stood the test of time. Demand for live concerts has never been so high. Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s biggest concert-organising company commented, having announced a five consecutive years of record revenue, “Although people are streaming music more than ever, concerts provide an undiluted connection to music that fans can’t find digitally, no matter how hard online services try to recreate it.’Regrettably the state of global leadership development doesn’t look like showing the same ability to stand the test of time. Studies are finding a slippage in the leadership bench strength in corporations. As of last year, only 14 percent of companies have a strong leadership bench, the lowest it’s ever been.

Not surprisingly, two thirds of the companies involved in a study known as the Global Leadership Forecast believe a new leadership model is needed. According to the Harvard Business Review (HBR), more than 50 percent of senior leaders believe their talent development efforts don’t adequately build critical skills and organizational capabilities. Sixty four percent of these companies believe their number one challenge is developing leaders to lead the “next generation.”

The “next generation” needs a different set of leaders as the world they are inheriting is vastly different to the generation before them. If there are no digital leadership skills, expect growth to stagnate drastically.

Despite these statistics, the market for leadership development is a lucrative one. Over $14 billion is spent by corporations on this issue, and there are tens of thousands of books on this topic alone.

Yet, the billions spent to date are not delivering the results required. As HBR notes, merely 10 percent of the money spent on corporate training and development in the United States results in the skills transfer you would expect. It’s simply not enough. In order to account for the rapid growth and development we will expect to see, a new approach to leadership will be needed. As the demand for leadership development increases, those of us with leadership experience will be required to step in to fill the void and bring what we can offer to the marketplace of ideas.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but a good place to start would be to remove the training wheels at an earlier stage in business careers. Yes, employees can learn from the leading by example of a strong leader; but a true leader empowers his or her staff to be able to tackle the issues on their own. By building an employee’s self-esteem, confidence and ability to handle complex situations on their own, the employees are halfway to becoming leaders themselves. This is what we push here at Circles.Life.

The global market is constantly changing, and adaptability is needed. Asia is the fastest growing economic region, led by China, Japan, India, South Korea and Indonesia. China, for one, is developing its Silk Road Project which will likely span Africa and Europe, as well as carrying a heavy fixation on the Indo-Pacific region. In twenty years’ time, no one can predict what the global economy will look like. In a world where multinationalism will change the dynamics of the global economy, only 18 percent of multinational companies have a strong enough global leadership pipeline necessary to address this future. Leaders and entrepreneurs with multicountry and multicultural experience will become a bare minimum essential.

As a final thought, if the state of global leadership development is declining then, naturally, the demand for strong leadership development will increase. This is why we at Circles.Life will be highly active in this space as the demand continues to rise in the wake of a rapidly changing global economy.

For more useful leadership tips, visit my blog www.anicolaus.com. For those of you with U2 tickets, rock on!