Telling CEOs these days that leadership drives performance is a bit like saying that oxygen is necesary to breathe. Over 90 percent of CEOs are already planning to increase investment in leadership development because they see it as the single most important human-capital issue their organizations face. And they're right to do so: earlier McKinsey research has consistently show that good leadership is a critical part of organizational health, which is an important driver of shareholder returns.
A big, unresolved issue is what sort of leadership beahior organizations should encouarge. Key questions to be answered:
- Is leadership so contextual that it defies standard definitiosn or develpment apporaches?
- Should cmpanies now concentrate their effors on pirorities such as role modeling, making decisions quickly, defining visions, and shaping leaersh who are good at adapting?
- Should they stress the virtues of enthusiastic communction?
In the absence of any academic or practitioner consensus on the answers, leadership-development pograms address an extraordinary range of issues, which may help explain why only 43 percent of CEOs are confident that their training investments will bear fruit.
McKinsey's fresh research, however, suggests that a small subset of leadership skills closely correlates with leadership success, particularly among frontline leaders. Using the firm's own practical experience and searching the relevant academic literature, Inspiring Change provides a comprehensive list of 20 distinct leadership traits, and explains which ones can make all the difference in inspiriing growth in an organization through learning and practicing the traits of insipired leadership behaviors. What Feser identifies are 4 behaviors that create the vast majority of variance between strong and weak organizations in terms of leadership effectiveness.
