Do We Have A Leadership Crisis?

We are in an interesting time and as you know this whole topic of leadership is a passion of mine. I become especially concerned when we can use language like 'jobless recovery" with a straight face.

I had a chance to read John Baldoni's blog on Harvard Publishing-http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/baldoni/2009/11/what_it_takes_to_lead_now.html and I have to tell you that it didn't provide me any comfort.

Baldoni references a recent McKinsey and Company survey citing that only 48% of managers believe that providing inspiration during the crisis is their job and 46% feel a responsibility to provide direction. Even more alarming the numbers drop to 45 and 39% post crisis. To make me feel even worse only 30% felt responsible for motivating their employees during the crisis and it drops to 23% post crisis!

Let me sum it up, less than 50% of the managers surveyed believe that inspiration, direction, motivation, and accountability are essential for managing corporate performance! I don't know about you, but that scares the hell out of me!

The defenders of course say that those are "senior management" or "executive responsibilities". They see their roles as tactical, gutting it out on the day to day. The problem is this is the "corps" of where that future leadership comes from. When does the age of enlightenment kick in and they recognize and develop their skills in these other areas.

When you add these facts to those including that 40% of "new" managers fail in their first 18 months on the job, usually for "non-technical" reasons, the costs of failures is estimated at between 2 and 4 times annual salary, and less than 30% of the organizations in the world have an employee engagement strategy it provides a pretty grim picture.

To quote Baldoni; "Execution without adequate leadership is short sighted. It will carry a company through a quarter or a year, but it will not provide a foundation for what organizations really need to do, and that is to grow."

I agree with Baldoni and also with Marcus Buckingham -
“Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant […] They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the human universals […] our need for clarity is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience, and creativity.”

A recent study by Rhoads and Whitlark also discusses that the crucial foundation for engagement (which by the way yields some wonderful byproducts in areas like productivity, sustainability, and profitability) is trust. Doesn't seem like we are moving the ball in the right direction.

I see time and time again where we seek to systematize leadership- to define it in terms of metrics and statistics. Looks like once again we are missing the point that it is relationships and people.

"Presenteeism" costs the U.S economy an estimated $200+ billion per year and a majority of our managers don't see the underlying issues that cause this phenomena as being their responsibility. We are in deep shit!

I guess these statistics say a couple of things to me:

• I am hoping that the organizations I am working with are represented in the 48% who "get it".
• We need to re-evaluate or management talent acquisition and development processes in a big hurry if we are going to have to make meaningful changes.

So I guess if I was leading an organization I would be asking myself - "Where is my management team on these issues?" and maybe even more importantly, " as a leader what am I doing about it?"

So I guess I have answered my own question- now I would pose one to you " Where do we go from here?" By the way, I wouldn't suggest turning this over to your HR department to fix. This is a key leadership issue.