What makes a 21st century leader?

Fiona Lander

In her second article on developing leaders, Fiona Lander looks at how perceptions of good leadership have changed

Across every profession, the notion of 21st century leadership has reached a level of sophistication never seen before, and the recruitment industry is no exception. The definition of an effective leader is now quite different from that of twenty years ago. Today, effective leadership is commonly viewed as central to organisational success, and more importance is placed on leadership development than we could have ever imagined.

Today, leaders must exude positive energy, define vision, build great teams, care, reward, teach, decide, innovate and execute. Unlike traditional classroom-based schemes, leadership development initiatives today typically offer performance support and real world application of skills through such methods as training programmes, coaching and mentoring, action learning and developmental assignments. Combining instruction with a real business setting helps professionals to hone essential skills, and allows the organisations to tackle relevant and crucial issues in real-time.

Action not knowledge

The goal of leadership development ultimately involves action not knowledge. Therefore, development today means providing people with opportunities to learn through work rather than taking them away from work to learn. In order to nurture top leadership talent that can effectively manage the challenges of today, we need to combine these experiences as well as considering additional training methods.

State of the art leadership development now occurs in the context of ongoing work initiatives that are closely linked with strategic business imperatives. Programmes are tailored to the specific needs of particular professionals and businesses. Furthermore, best practice organisations recognise leadership as a key component of jobs at all levels and are committed to nurturing leaders throughout their organisations to ensure they have solid talent pipelines for the future.

Increasingly, I am visiting organisations that have CEOs who model leadership development through their strong commitment to creating leaders internally. Of course, traditional leadership competencies remain a core dimension of development activities in most organisations. Indeed, most businesses in the recruitment space have identified core leadership competencies, or at least tried to define the characteristics and qualities of successful leaders. But it is paramount that these competencies correspond to the company’s particular strategy and business model. They need to match the objectives, goals and organisational structure of the company.

Tailored development

We now understand that development programmes in isolation of the business environment rarely bring about profound or long-lasting changes, so organisations must develop leaders and leadership competencies that correspond with – and are specific to – their distinct business challenges. While common leadership qualities or competencies characterise effective leaders, developing such core leader qualities may not be enough. Not only may organisations differ in their identification of critical leadership competencies, some would argue that it is unlikely that all leaders within an organisation must possess the same set of competencies to be successful or to help their consultancy to thrive.

According to this perspective, leaders should not be accountable for demonstrating a particular set of behaviours, but rather should be measured on desired outcomes. This perspective looks beyond competencies, which have a tendency to focus on “what needs fixing”, and instead focus attention on the whole person. The paper, Leadership Development: Past, Present & Future (Buckingham & Vosburgh 2003), highlights the fact that we should concentrate on peoples’ strengths and natural talents rather than a ‘reductionist list of idiosyncratic competencies’. Development is increasingly seen as a process of developing and leveraging strengths and of understanding and minimising the impact of weaknesses. This is not a ‘one size fits all’ exercise. In order for businesses to thrive, we need to mould existing talent to create modern-day bespoke managers. 

Look out for my next article, which will focus on the future of leadership. My previous one can be read here.

Fiona Lander is head of Professional Development at APSCo and MD of Lander Consultancy