A recent research paper from Center of Creative Coaching for Leadership titled “The Challenges Leaders Face Around the World: More Similar than Different” explores the challenges facing leaders today.

The research found that senior management and executives wrestle with the following 6 leadership challenges:

Developing Managerial Effectiveness: The challenge of developing the relevant skills — such as time-management, prioritisation, strategic thinking, decision-making and getting up to speed with the job — to be more effective at work.

Inspiring Others: The challenge of inspiring or motivating others to ensure they are satisfied with their jobs and working smarter.

Developing Employees: The challenge of developing others, including mentoring and coaching.

Leading a Team: The challenge of team-building, team development and team management. Specific challenges include how to instill pride in a team or support the team, how to lead a big team and what to do when taking over a new team.

Guiding Change: The challenge of managing, mobilising, understanding and leading change. Guiding change includes knowing how to mitigate consequences, overcome resistance to change and deal with employees’ reaction to change.

Managing Internal Stakeholders and Politics: The challenge of managing relationships, politics and image. This challenge includes gaining managerial support and managing up and getting buy-in from other departments, groups or individuals.

Reflecting on this list of challenges it’s clear that we are struggling to adapt effectively to a Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) environment - the uncertain and fast changing times of today. We’re experiencing immense change at all levels of society. And this change is happening so fast that we often find ourselves struggling to keep up. Leadership styles and practices of the past are often no longer relevant. The result? Significant change that requires personal and corporate transformation to navigate successfully.

In times like these it comes as no surprise we’re seeking to build teams, inspire others, lead change and manage dynamic internal relationships and politics. The immense time pressures and the speed of change requires leaders to improve their strategic focus, decision-making processes and their personal effectiveness.

Enterprises who are not proactively addressing these challenges will be ill equipped to lead into the future. So there is an urgent need to develop people at all levels and prepare them for the competitive environment of tomorrow.

Reflecting on these top 6 challenges what are you doing in response?

Great leadership is based on five interrelated leadership capabilities, each supported by a number of leadership practices. Intime of uncertainty and turbulence times these five core capabilities will help you lead and grow your teams.

The five leadership interrelated capabilities provides a lens to assist a leader to develop a robust approach and guide for action.

1. Contextual Awareness

Contextual awareness is about making sense of the context in which leadership is being executed. It requires leaders develop an understanding of the situation and environment impacting their leadership choices and actions. Contextual awareness is an important capability as is creates a shared map of the environment. It ensures that leaders face reality and make sense of the world around them.

Leaders need a good grasp of how the world is changing around them and the implications of that change on their ability to achieve the vision and drive change.

2. Setting Direction

Setting direction is a capability that establishes shared purpose, vision, values and goals that provides clear direction. Direction implies change, a change from the current reality towards some future state.  Setting direction requires an answer to the question “What future do we want to create?” This supports the development of a compelling vision of the future that inspires others and is shared by the community. A clear and shared direction gives people a sense of meaning.

3. Building Capability

Building capability requires leaders develop and align the teams, processes, skills and technologies required to translate the future direction into reality. Bold vision and change demands a large amount of innovation to bring the vision into reality. It’s the recognition that you cannot keep doing the same things and expect different results. Vision demands innovation and a search for new and better ways of doing things.

4. Inspiring Commitment

Inspiring commitment is the capability to bring people to a place where that they willingly devote their time and energy to support the shared direction. This demands of leaders that they connect and develop authentic, trusting and caring relationships with others. To lead effectively in a distributed and interconnected world requires that we develop not only vertical but also horizontal relationships.

5. Personal Effectiveness

Personal effectiveness acknowledges the personal dimension of leadership, it’s about how effectively an individual leads oneself. This requires a personal understanding of who we are, our skills, values, character, strengths and weaknesses.

Personal effectiveness recognises that there is no one right way to lead and that to be effective leaders require the self-awareness and understanding of where they are effective and where they need to partner with others.

Summary

If we examine the elements it’s clear that each of these capabilities are interdependent, without vision it becomes difficult to build capability or to inspire commitment or about change. For leadership to happen each of the five capabilities  need to be addressed together and kept in balance. A focus on only one or two capabilities at the expense of others will yield poor results.

Please share your ideas, I'm always interested in seeing alternative points of view.

Success is within the reach of just about everyone. But personal success without leadership ability brings only limited effectiveness. A person's impact is only a fraction of what it could be with good leadership. The higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be. Whatever you will accomplish is restricted by your ability to lead others.

Leadership ability is the lid that determines a person's level of effectiveness. The lower a person's ability to lead, the lower the lid on his potential. The higher the leadership, the greater the effectiveness. Your leadership ability-for better or for worse-always determines your effectiveness and the potential impact of your organization. To reach the highest level of effectiveness, you have to raise the lid on your leadership ability. The good news is that you can-if you're willing to pay the price to change.

To be an effective manager these days we have to learn how to get things done. Delegating tasks and holding your people accountable is only the start of the process. How do we effectively achieve this?

There are three types of power in most organizations. Each has different outcomes on your effectiveness as a manager.

The first is role power. This is the power the organization formally grants you over those who report to you. Expertise power is the ability to influence others by being smarter or more knowledgeable than others. Finally there is relationship power, or the ability to influence others based on a personal/professional relationship usually developed over time.

To many managers today rely on role power. This is the least effective of the three powers. This only works when you are seeking to avoid failure opposed to seeking success. In today’s working environment this is a dangerous place for a manger or sales professional to be. Role power is best relegated to those places where processes specifically call for it.

The greater your expertise power and/or relationship power, the greater the possibility of an effective outcome on a delegated task.

Rather than telling, try asking. The persuasive part of asking is the ask itself. It’s far more effective to ask your associate to do what you need them to do. Further to that, you ask when they can do it, rather than imposing your own deadline. The way to persuade others in not to convince them with data and tell them about your needs, but rather by asking them for their help.

When asking for a commitment on a task, be nice. Don’t get mad and imply threats, don’t let your “Role power” creep into the discussion. Ask without stress or tension and smile. Once a commitment is agreed upon, say Thanks You and confirm the commitment and deadline.