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Executive Summary
[From CCL: Future Trends in Leadership]
The Current Situation
The environment has changed – it is more complex,
volatile, and unpredictable. The skills needed for
leadership have also changed – more complex and
adaptive thinking abilities are needed. The methods
being used to develop leaders have not changed (much).
The majority of managers are developed from on-the-job
experiences, training, and coaching/mentoring; while
these are all still important,
leaders are no longer developing fast
enough or in the right ways to match the new
environment.
The Challenge Ahead
This is no longer just a leadership challenge (what
good leadership looks like), it is a development
challenge (the process of how to grow “bigger” minds)
Managers have become experts on the “what” of
leadership, but novices in the “how” of their own
development
Four Trends for the Future
of Leadership Development
More focus on vertical development
There are two different types of development –
horizontal and vertical. A great deal of time has been
spent on “horizontal” development (competencies), but
very little time on “vertical” development
(developmental stages). The methods for horizontal and
vertical development are very different. Horizontal
development can be “trans-mitted” (from an expert),
but vertical development must be earned (for oneself).
Transfer of greater developmental ownership
to the individual
People develop fastest when they feel responsible
for their own progress. The current model encourages
people to believe that someone else is responsible for
their development – human resources, their manager, or
trainers. We will need to help people out of the
passenger seat and into the driver’s seat of their own
development.
Greater focus on collective rather than
individual leadership
Leadership development has come to a point of being
too individually focused and elitist. There is a
transition occurring from the old paradigm in which
leadership resided in a person or role, to a new one
in which leadership is a collective process that is
spread throughout networks of people. The question
will change from, “Who are the leaders?” to What
conditions do we need for leadership to flourish in
the network? How do we spread leadership capacity
throughout the organization and democratize
leadership?
Much greater focus on innovation in
leadership development methods
There are no simple, existing models or programs,
which will be sufficient to develop the levels of
collective leadership required to meet an increasingly
complex future. Instead, an era of rapid innovation
will be needed in which organizations experiment with
new approaches that combine diverse ideas in new ways
and share these with others. Technology and the web
will both provide the infrastructure and drive the
change. Organizations that embrace the changes will do
better than those who resist it
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