Is Leadership Broken? Redefining Leadership for Future Success

Is the traditional leadership culture broken?

In this episode, we explore the fractured state of leadership from the executive level to emerging leaders. Learn why organizations reward productivity over people skills and discover how leaders at every level can take control and redefine what leadership truly means for a thriving workplace culture. Empower yourself to become the leader your team needs.

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Transcript

 Welcome back to Relationships At Work – Your guide to building workplace connections and avoiding leadership blind spots..  I’m your host Russel Lolacher

I’m a communications and leadership expert with a couple of decades of experience and a heap of curiosity on how we can make the workplace better. If you’re a leader trying to understand and improve your impact on work culture and the employee experience, you’re in the right place.

This mini-episode is a quick and valuable bit of information to shift your thinking for the week ahead. 

Inspired by our R@W Note Newsletter, I’m passing on to you… 

Is Leadership Culture Broken?

Today will be a little different as I want to pose a hypothesis that I've been mulling over a bit lately. And I'm curious about your thoughts. 

(feel free to email me at hello@russellolacher.com)

Is leadership culture actually just broken?

Sorry, I really don't want to be a downer but the more conversations I have and articles I read, the more I see a fundamental problem with organizational leadership and how its set up. 

And it's really going to take some effort… our efforts to make change.

I’m looking at this as a problem split in two – the executive level and the emerging leader level. Basically, the top and bottom of our established leadership cycle is fractured and there’s a real need to think and act differently to address it.

TOP HALF - C-Suite

There is a lot of discussion and focus on executive leadership training. Go on Linkedin. This is a very common service that consultancies are providing. Basically it’s to provide those individuals with the soft skills and development that they haven't gotten through the majority of their career. As we’ve talked about a lot on the show, most leaders don't get any leadership training when they are put in these positions of responsibility. 

Research published the Harvard Business Review found the average age for first-time managers is 30 while their first leadership training doesn’t happen until in their 40s. 

Charters Management Institute calls many of them “accidental managers” – 82% pushed into roles without proper training. 

So once they get to that executive leadership level, people are "important" enough to now get that training, have that money invested, take that time that they have been so thoroughly lacking.

But Why? No, really. Why? They’re successful without it.

Once those individuals are at the executive level, they've been rewarded and promoted without having those soft skills. Our cultures supported their journey up the corporate ladder without them have to learn how to foster a healthy culture, create new leaders or improve employee engagement. Some may do it naturally but our organizations show them it's not as important as being productive, fixing other people's problems and/or knowing the right people. 

So why would or should they take it seriously now? What's the incentive? They've never needed it before. Success is achieved through pay and opportunity. 

BOTTOM HALF - Emerging Leaders

There are many that are getting into those first leadership roles, eager to become the leader that they never had. To model great leadership and be a sponge for better practices, they are looking for development opportunities that come their way.

Great, lets invest in training, in leadership development, in personality tests, in conferences, etc. Which, is all a great step. But then those eager leaders see who gets promoted. Who gets rewarded. And it's not the great leaders that are creating other leaders. It's the ones that are productive, or fix other people's problems and/or know the right people. 

So what are we defining as leadership? That. So as great as it will to have those human skills, it’s not typically the train to success. 

This always leads me back to the importance of definitions. And "leadership" is such a prime example. Of course, there are definitions if you Google, but what is the definition according to your company? What is the type of leadership that is rewarded and promoted? THAT is your definition, regardless of what is said or put on a poster.

So at the top, they don’t need to be better leaders because that hasn’t been needed for their success. And the emerging leaders want to become better but see that to make money and move up, it shouldn’t be the priority. 

Of course, not every organization is like this. But sadly, it does exist. Even if it's not one we want to admit to ourselves because it doesn't fit the story we tell ourselves.

But we as leaders, we can do better. We can rewrite that definition, regardless of what is rewarded. And that comes with balancing that productivity with real leadership, even if the organization only favours one side of this. Change happens, even if slowly.

It's up to us to control what we can control - our experience and what we know is great leadership for our teams.  

Is leadership broken? Yes, but it doesn't have to be.