“In the event of a food crisis, the great need would be for someone to discover a way to feed the hungry. In the event of a job shortage, the great need would be for someone to discover a way to offer gainful employment. To curb the current leadership crisis, we must find a way to discover potential leaders.”

                                                                                                             Smart Leadership Mag-Ezine

In the latter half of the last century, many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies found themselves enjoying celebrity-like status. In the fat and heady ’80s, and even through the reengineered ’90s, charismatic leaders at successful companies were as adored as sports figures or celebrities. The market could believe in them. Investors and analysts could trust them. People wanted to buy and sell things from them, at times it seemed just for the opportunity—the privilege—of doing business with them.

While business became entangled in the craze that was the dot.com boom, however, bad things began to happen in the ranks of these good people. As demands grew to produce even more growth, ever-stronger results in shorter periods of time, the market grew littered with contract buyouts, resignations, and forced retirements—all amid major market declines and share-price suffering. In addition to performance issues, journalists unearthed poor performance rifts, tricky accounting, and illegal activities beyond Vivendi, Enron, and Martha Stewart. Now, it seems the reputations of many once-admired corporate stars have crashed to earth with an echoing thud.

If Jack Welch represented the archetype of the last generation of great, charismatic CEO champions and if even he no longer rides as valiantly atop his white horse, where are the new role models ascending to define the executive ideal of a new generation? What qualities must they possess? If you can believe the pundits and the research, what a business needs now more than ever are motivators, fearless renegades, change agents—and above all, a few safe pairs of hands.

Discovering and Getting What You Need

Research from The Conference Board, Spencer Stuart, and other leading global executive research firms reveals little to suggest that companies know precisely the skills and attributes they should seek in leaders. Among the experts and researchers, some common themes have started to surface, however.

One emerging “new leadership” quality appears to be a healthy degree of fearlessness, if not an altogether-natural predisposition to avoid conformity. Renowned management expert, business professor in both Europe and the United States, and author, Pierre Casse, summarizes this trait in a recent interview for CGE&Y’s Les Fontaines Business Learning Forum e-zine, Focus: “At the very top, many senior executives, top senior leaders, are lost; because the game is different today, the requirements are different, the expectations are different; they are facing a major cultural challenge, and frankly they are nervous. We now need leaders who are not afraid of challenging themselves, who are not afraid of exploring alternatives—different ways to get together to invent, be creative to produce or manufacture products and goods and services and intangibles and also to sell, and thirdly, we need leaders with the ability to take risks.”

Related to this, the ability to cultivate and drive change is also a new and necessary skill set. Whatever the future holds, most experts agree it will require the ability to constantly and continuously manage change—and that ability to manage these critical skills appears in short supply. “The problem is that most people don’t want to recognize or accept change. Many organizations tend to ignore the real issues that prevent them from profitable change,” notes Larraine Segil, international alliance authority and author of Dynamic Leader, Adaptive Organization: Ten Essential Traits for Managers (Wiley, 2002). “Today’s manager must exhibit a special kind of leadership; he or she cannot avoid or deny the issues that are most difficult.”

Other emerging requirements stem from socio-political trends as much as business needs. In an era of uncertainty and international unrest where the ties binding long-standing allies, markets, and partners continue to be cut and retied together without the old school rulebooks, the need for familiarity and safety has grown exponentially. Perform a Google search these days with the phrase “security in an insecure world” and some 298,000 entries appear, ranging from computer security to international security to financial security to job security.

With people running scared in virtually every sector of the economy, today’s executives require a solid combination of what we might term “security skills.” This set of required capabilities includes upgrades in both communication and visionary acumen, the ability to inspire confidence, a gift for creating a sense of stability in even unstable situations, and the capacity to deliver. Now more than ever, a “safe pair of hands” is a most critical leadership asset to motivate employees, customers, and shareholders alike.

Beyond these core and critical additions to the future leader’s skill base, other qualifications are essential to address the changing needs of the global market and the individual industries new leaders serve. The knee-jerk reaction may be to seek people with qualities that are the polar opposites of those of the outgoing leadership regimes—not atypical of what we’ve seen everywhere from replacements of sports managers to local clergy. But a better approach would be to begin asking and answering questions about expectations for these folks and the businesses they will operate short- and longer-term. What trends will they need to tackle and what history must they be able to overcome?

Scanning for Future Direction

CGE&Y’s biannual analysis of trends on the business horizon, FutureScan, suggests several key factors will shape our immediate future regardless of industry or location. Immediate capability requirements for up-and-coming leaders will likely include:

•Bean-counter reformation: It is no secret that investors now insist corporate information become more transparent. In the wake of accounting missteps at Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, WorldCom, and others, shareholders demand renewed emphasis on improved corporate financial accountability and transparency—improvements to better enable investors to fairly assess the value of companies.

Additionally, environmental and social activists are pressing for further transparency of corporate activities in areas such as pollution, Third World labor, and workplace rights. This is a worldwide movement—in fact, the United Nations has established the Global Reporting Initiative for corporate transparency in sustainability, labor standards, and finance.

The connection to leadership in this regard is clear: both social and financial stakeholders expect open and accessible leadership decisions and data. From new reporting knowledge to real business ethics, leaders need to develop these advanced capabilities, and not solely to improve their knowledge of “the new numbers.”

•Captive audience escapes: Several disjointed efforts have produced strong signals in the advertising world and are creating tremors elsewhere regarding the nature of marketing and the advancing tide of consumer caution. Spawned by the Internet and the instability of the traditional ad-based revenue models, historically identifiable demographics have splintered into larger, more heterogeneous mixes of people—making target markets harder to pigeonhole, predict, and sell. Not surprisingly, the rise of guerrilla marketing techniques continues, as businesses struggle with the challenge of reaching customers who won’t be captured.

For leaders, this is already requiring a bit of business dyslexia—the need to look at the customer and at times the world untraditionally. Perhaps it is not a happy accident that some of today’s better CEOs are literally dyslexic (Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, John Chambers—not to mention historical powerhouses like Churchill and Einstein). Their own hard wiring forced them to look at things a little differently. Leaders of the future need to do this by necessity.

•Games come into play: The technology for computer gaming has advanced immeasurably in the quarter century since Pong caught the attention of the first “gamers.” Most significant in the advances are immersive and realistic graphics and sounds; development of near-intelligent software agents; and the easy connection of multiple gaming systems via the Internet. Although this presents a booming market in entertainment, these technologies have yet to be seriously applied to business. However, a number of companies and laboratories are attempting to do just that, promising a powerful new tool for communicating, educating, and advancing business goals.

MIT’s program in Comparative Media Studies is developing a number of prototypes through its Games-to-Teach Project to harness the emotional impact of video games to convey knowledge. Business leaders similarly need to maintain the capacity to learn and grow throughout their organizations; we call it “letting people out to play with one another,” and it is a critical step in cultivating innovation and growth.

With an eye toward both these current and future trends, businesses can develop a keener sense of the skills they will require going forward.

Spotting High-Potential Talent

The July issue of Fast Company features a story on several spectacular CEO failures. The article points out that often the very qualities that led to the failures of these individuals are the same qualities that destined them for leadership. One person’s strength can also be his or her undoing. This paradox makes the current search for potential talent a venerable high-wire act.

Research from Spencer Stuart on successful CEOs in comparison with their failed counterparts found that:

•Successful leaders switched companies nearly 60 percent less often; 
•Were cultivated primarily from other general management roles 50 percent more
  often then their unsuccessful counterparts; 
•Spent a greater proportion of their careers in a corporate environment.

Bottom line? Some of these folks may be closer at hand than management thinks, and a savvy manager can play a strong role in ensuring the superpowers of the talent base are put to good use.

High-potential talent development, like charity, begins at home. Now more than ever, it’s important to begin assessing capabilities across an organization’s talent base. Before the most successful within the organization progress to the senior ranks, management will need to provide them with the motivation they will one day need to stick with the organization in return. The days of engaging quick-fix artists from the outside appear long gone—and represent a chancy proposition in this economy. Task-oriented turnaround managers like Al Dunlap have not only fallen out of fashion, many appear to have run out of tricks—cutting to grow goes only so far, after all. Your future more likely lies within.

It is critical to seek talent development tools and assessment options that don’t pigeonhole your team members but allow you to look for and cultivate leadership predispositions across the board. The head of leadership development for a well-known British FTSE 100 company remarked recently that beyond—the factors listed in leadership competency models—numerous critical qualities don’t appear and those that do are quite difficult to measure.

These qualities include integrity, energy, inspiration, drive—let’s simply refer to them as the X-factor—the things you can’t quite measure or reward but everyone agrees are necessary for top-notch leadership. Some observers believe these qualities are something a leader has or doesn’t have—they can’t be taught. For certain, even if the X-factor does exist, it needs to be applied and cultivated to add value in your organization. The truth is that a good leader makes you feel like there is still a pot of gold worth finding at the end of the proverbial rainbow—and he or she instills in you the belief that, together, you can believe in and achieve something of value.

In fact, the ability to make people trust and believe coupled with the capacity to actually—and, at least, at times, brilliantly—deliver remains at the heart of the successful leadership equation. Organizations do best now to spend more effort looking for new skills in non-standard packages and creatively cultivating talent at all opportunities.