What Leaders Need Most to Inspire Great Teams (It's Not What You Think)

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Do you hold aspirations to someday?lead a team, department, or organization? Perhaps you're there now but challenged by how to navigate the?countless decisions that come flying in your direction.

Well, the first thing you have to do, whether you're a?line manager on the floor or an executive in the C-suite?is to firmly?accept?the fact that the majority of the leadership decisions you will make will involve people.

And since people are an organization's most appreciable asset (as the cliché goes), it becomes even more apparent that a leader's most important asset is to develop his or her people skills (i.e., soft skills).

The Soft Skills Gap

In the DDI study "High Resolution Leadership," which captured data from over 15,000 assessment participants?ranging from managers to the C-suite, no more than half of the front-line managers who participated in structured simulations?actually?displayed behaviors for effective interaction with people that lead to results. The biggest gaps found were:

• Listening skills
• Responding with empathy
• Clarifying what others are saying
• Developing others' ideas

In another DDI study leaders acknowledge with a majority vote that "human capital" remains their top challenge. Four of the top 10 human capital strategies CEOs selected as crucial for their companies' success are focused on, what else -- leadership. Among them:

• Improve leadership development programs.
• Enhance the effectiveness of senior management teams.
• Improve the effectiveness of frontline supervisors and managers.
• Improve succession planning.

Today's CEOs and HR execs understand that their organizations cannot retain highly engaged, high-performing employees without developing leaders to manage, coach, develop, and inspire multigenerational, globally dispersed teams.

The Bottom Line

This shouldn't be a surprise. Survey responses in that same study?from 13,124 leaders in 2,031 organizations in 48 countries concluded that investing in soft skills development for leaders produces hard, bottom-line results.

This is no longer the wishful thinking of HR and people execs infatuated with the idea of some idealistic "humans first" corporate culture. It is the stuff that reluctant executives have to finally acknowledge as a top priority during the annual budgeting sign-off process.

So that begs the question: With companies spending an estimated $31 billion a year on leadership programs, what's the right approach?

As Barbara Kellerman of Harvard University wrote in?The End of Leadership, only 37 percent of leaders rated their leadership development program as effective. They often don't deliver measurable impact and typically promote superficial solutions that fail to help leaders to learn actual skills that lead to success on the job.

Data gathered by Global Human Capital Trends 2016 suggest that executives need to explore new approaches to leadership development, including:

• Developing a structured, scientific method to succession planning and development.
• Identifying and fast-tracking potential (emerging) leaders earlier into leadership roles.
• Building a systemic, values-based leadership culture to address the leadership gap.
• Offering experiential, evidence-based leadership programs to build actualy leadership competencies.

On that last point, a leadership development program, or curriculum, must include pre- and post-course assessments to measure impact and effectiveness. Additionally, learning content must be research-driven and blend in stretch assignments, coaching, and continuous "live" touch-points baked into the process too increase learning.

One big reason leadership remains a challenge is due to companies not identifying and developing young, potential talent early in their careers to accelerate up the leadership ranks to meet the complex human needs of today's workers.

The world of leadership has shifted away from power roles and “positional authority”; managers have gone from acting as strictly supervisors to hit their numbers to servant leaders inspiring team loyalty through empathy, emotional intelligence, and moral authority.

This leads to an important question: Are companies ready for the new leaders who are needed today? Is yours?

Moving Forward

Organizations will have to rethink where they spend their money and refocus their strategy to improve their existing development efforts, thereby improving leadership quality and minimizing the risks brought on by unprepared leaders.

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Ready to grow your leaders?

I have created the ‘From Boss to Leader’ course to teach new and emerging leaders the leadership skills they need to succeed in post-pandemic times. Watch this?2-minute video?to see if it may be right for your team. Then I invite you to?book a 15-minute call with me?so I can personally hear your challenges and offer some free advice.

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About Marcel Schwantes

Marcel Schwantes?is a virtual speaker, leadership trainer, executive coach, author,?podcast host, and?syndicated columnist?with a global following. He teaches emerging leaders the skills to build great work cultures where people and businesses flourish.