Is Your Competitive Advantage at Stake? Leadership Could Be the Answer!

If leadership experiences cause a company to lose talent, then the quality of your organization's leadership impacts your competitive advantage.  

The need to develop leaders is a priority...

...yet the skills required for future leaders may be different than in the past.   The “command and control” leadership style could drive your most valuable workers away at a time when their retention is critical.  Successful leaders will need to build trust, support collaboration and deliver results.  They may find themselves leading teams comprised of full-time, part-time, freelance and contract workers. Companies have to develop leadership skills today to be ready for the workforce realities of tomorrow.

The definition of leadership has shifted over time. 

In the past, being a leader was synonymous with having direct reports.  With the leaner, matrix structure of many companies today, leaders may not have direct reports.  They may lead teams of people who do not formally report to them and have to leverage influence and coaching skills for success.  When we talk about effective leadership today, it’s less about how many direct reports a person has and more concerned with the successful outcomes achieved under that leadership.

The people that leaders manage is quickly changing. 

Kelly recently conducted research and found nearly a third of workers identify themselves as free agents.  The belief that people become free agents by circumstance is not supported by the research.  Many people across the globe are choosing to be free agents to have more flexibility and control in their lives.  The talent your organization needs to be successful may not want to be your employee or ever be employed by any company. 

Since the early 1980s, economic downturns and business challenges have driven companies to focus on making their operations as lean as possible.  The emergence of the world wide web and technology platforms allowed businesses to make shifts from “brick and mortar” to virtual environments to better fit with their strategies.  These changes have impacted the size of learning and development departments and how they engage with employees.  The result is often an increase in the blend of lower cost, “self-service learning” in their offerings. 

As leadership development requires behavior change, “self service learning” does not effectively support most leadership models. 

Chief Learning Officers are challenged to develop leaders for tomorrow with the budget realities of today.  Some may ask if quality leadership development is possible without the luxury of having participants travel to a central location for classroom-based workshops.

When designing and establishing effective leadership development programs, the factors we need to consider have changed. We may have fewer resources, but we also have powerful technology at our disposal. Remember, your organization’s competitive advantage is at stake. 

So the question becomes: 

Can we change the behavior of a large number of geographically dispersed leaders by leveraging virtual learning experiences and achieve the enhanced capabilities required to lead our future workforce?

Discover Kelly's answer to this question.

On October 13 I’ll join a number of other speakers at the Fall 2015 Chief Learning Officer (CLO) Symposium in Austin, Texas. I’ll discuss this question, as well as the concept of Learning Circles we recently introduced here at Kelly, in my presentation. If you’re considering attending or are attending the symposium, please connect with me and attend my session where we’ll talk about:

• Impacting behavior change through engaging learning communities
• Using existing technology to connect dispersed workforce populations
• Applying traditional coaching and mentoring models for leadership success with free agent and other types of workers

You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn and follow the event chatter on Twitter @clomedia #CLOSYM.