Are We Doing Leadership Wrong?

Leadership is essential to the success and sustainability of any organization, especially during times of rapid change. It is therefore worrying that a recent leadership forecast showed a 17% drop in the number of leaders who reported their company had high-quality leaders. At only 40%, this is the steepest decline in leadership quality in a decade. The last time it was this low was between 2007–2008, the height of the global financial crisis.
This begs the question:

"What's going wrong?"

A Crisis of Confidence

Surveys suggest less than half of people have faith in their immediate supervisor and less than a third trust their senior leaders, and CXOs.

Where has the trust gone?

The recent Global Health crisis with a shift in work practices coupled with digital transformation, the rise in AI, and a pending environmental catastrophe have exposed the weakness of the old leadership model that we could trust that our leaders knew what to do.

The old hierarchical model of centralized decision-making, with micromanagement of behaviors, and focus on short-term results has stifled creativity, innovation, and a sense of ownership.

Of course, not all leaders fit this mold, and many have stepped up to build relationships and engage their employees to face the crisis and be future-ready. These leaders are following a new playbook.

A New Leadership Playbook

The old leadership model was about broadcasting, the new leadership playbook is about conversations.

"Leadership is a conversation, a one-to-one conversation, and one-to-many conversations"

A conversation creates an exchange of ideas and a sense of shared ownership in solutions discovered and actions agreed upon. Seeing leadership as a conversation shifts the paradigm of the leader needing to get everything right to create trust, to the leader facilitating conversations that move people from problems to solutions.

I wrote the first draft of The New Leadership Playbook in the midst of the health crisis, in conversation with a Chief People Officer who needed to empower her managers to lead in the new environment. Each of the 12 Plays in the book is an example of a practical conversation that leaders need to have with their employees.

For example, the feedback conversation, which I expand on in this video:

An Idea Worth Sharing

The drive behind the highly successful TED and TEDx events is to have an idea worth sharing. I believe that the idea that leadership is a conversation is an idea worth sharing, and I do so in my motivational leadership speeches around the world.

As leaders start having conversations, they rebuild trust, increase ownership, and are able to be vulnerable and authentic. The results are greater engagement, creativity, and innovation.

If you are an HR leader who wants to enhance the leadership within your organization or an event organizer who wants a different leadership speaker, then contact me.