We have coached hundreds of leaders and executives over the years and led an equal number of workshops on leadership and coaching. I often ask our clients in our workshops to identify the number one reason that people leave their organization. The answer has been universally the same over the 27 years I have been in this business. That answer is – my direct boss. If retention and succession have become leading contenders in organizational development success conversations, what keeps these companies from doing more about this dilemma?
Psychometrics Canada conducted a survey to study leadership in the Canadian workplace. Of those surveyed, 63.2% saw leaders as having a lot of influence over their organizations’ success with only 2.5% reporting that leaders had very little influence. This leads me to believe that our informal surveys over the years do have merit.
The survey also found that good leadership created some of the following results:
• Increased motivation (85.5%),
• Improved working relationships (85.1%),
• Higher team performance (80.7%),
• Better solutions to problems (68.9%), and
• Major innovations (41.6%).
So hooray for good leadership! But what about poor leadership? With so many ‘accidental promotions’ into leadership and not enough investment in developing good leadership skills, is there a cost to poor leadership ability?
The Psychometric survey professes that when not properly used, leadership can have many negative effects. Results falling into the top 5:
• Good people quitting and a lack of morale (91.7%),
• Employees’ skills not being utilized (87.2%),
• Disconnection between organization’s goals and employees’ work (76%).
• Feuding staff members (68.3%), and
• Failed projects (60%).
The Management and Leadership section of most bookstores seems to always take up as much space as the Mystery section. And with its challenges maybe the Management and Leadership section should be married into the Mystery section! With so much on the line in terms of positive benefits versus negative effects, uncovering the skills necessary for effective leadership is critically important.
The survey rated the importance of various leadership skills to success:
• Communication is critically important (90%),
• Dealing with change (52.6%),
• Managing people (48.2%),
• Setting goals (37.5%),
• Solving problems (30.3%), and
• Project management (12%).
When these key skills were rated survey participants were also asked to rate leaders on their current effectiveness in each of these skill sets. Here lies another challenge. Only 27.8% rated leaders’ communication skills as effective, and only 24% indicated that the leaders they know are effective when it comes to dealing with change. These respondents cited a number of obstacles that get in the way of leaders developing these skills. These include leaders not seeing the need for improvement (67.5%), not having enough time (63.1%), lacking support from superiors (50.1%), and having inadequate training budgets (41.6%).
When asked what leaders could do to be more effective, respondents endorsed actions such as:
• Clearly communicating how the organization plans to manage change (89%),
• Talking less and listening more (81%),
• Providing clear expectations (78%),
• Having more informal interaction with staff (76%),
• Assigning tasks to staff based on their skills rather than office politics (71%),
• Holding people accountable (68%),
• Giving employees more responsibility (65%),
• Deferring to people with greater expertise (63%), and
• Overcoming resistance to change (48%).
Now all of this may seem so much like ‘duh’ to those of you reading this and as a coach and leadership developer for almost 28 years now, I would want to agree with you. The concern is that this seems to be so true and even more obvious that we wonder what it takes for organizations to realize how valuable it is for them to find the right leaders, develop the right leaders and keep the right leaders! And finally, here’s a toast to all of you that have had the seemingly rare luxury of working for and with one of those talented few.
