Does the world suffer from a leadership crisis?
Some 86% of the 1,767 experts who responded to the recent World Economic Forum Survey on the Global Agenda think so.
The apparent failure of leadership to deal with the existential challenges faced in today’s world might be behind this perception.
Challenges from climate change to global inequality, geopolitical instability, economic and health crises are making the world more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). These are tough issues for leaders at every level.
Interestingly, this lack of faith in leaders is happening just as a global recognition for the importance of leadership is emerging.
Schools and universities are making leadership a staple of their curricula and educational outcomes, organisations are investing more than ever in leadership development, and the leadership section at bookstores is growing daily. What is going on?
The leadership crisis seems to emanate, at least in part, from the contradictions between what markets currently reward leaders for and what the world needs.
Let us examine three of the dimensions where these contradictions are most profound:
Timescale
While many of the challenges we face require long-term thinking, short-termism is rampant.
Leaders can be under pressure to deliver quick results or pay a hefty price.
Focus
Despite all the rhetoric, many organisations measure results with an internal focus on individual success rather than the success of the entire ecosystem. This influences the decisions leaders make. Competition vs collaboration
While no single individual, organisation or even country will ever be able to address the biggest challenges of our time such as climate change and inequality alone, we still see nationalism, populism, price wars, and an outright war happening in the 21st century.
Leaders often find it difficult to navigate the fine line between competing and the need to work together for the common good.
Clearly, we need a new breed of leaders who are able to deliver the immediate results without sacrificing the long-term viability of their organisations, sectors, and even the world.
These leaders need to possess an “ecosystem mindset”, and be capable of finding commonalities and building consensus with competing and disagreeing parties, while driving the agendas and interests of their institutions and communities.
These leaders will need a number of attributes, values and skills, including a deep sense of purpose, being self-aware, and having the effectiveness and soft skills to be able to deliver a positive impact to their constituencies and the wider world.
We call these purpose-driven leaders. Having a clear sense of purpose at individual and organisational levels can go a long way in empowering leaders to both do well and do good.
Despite being an innate part of every one of us, purpose needs to be discovered.
Mark Twain said: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” To inculcate this type of purpose-driven leadership, we at Heriot-Watt University developed a methodology to help leaders cultivate their own self-awareness, discover their purpose, and design plans to mobilise their purpose into positive impact on the world.
The process results in the articulation of what we call an “Impact Statement”. We offer this to all our students, staff, and leaders in private, public and non-profit organisations.
An example of a purpose-led organisation is CVS Health, which owns thousands of stores and pharmacies all around the United States. At one point, the company’s annual sales from tobacco and related products were US$2bil (RM9.3bil).
The company set out to identify and define its purpose, which was to help people live a healthy life. As a result, in 2014, it decided to cease the sale of cigarettes in its 7,000 stores.
Its then chief executive officer Larry J. Merlo said at the time, “Sometimes, we all need to dust off our values and ask ourselves if we’re truly living in concert with them.’’
While the company gave up a profitable line of business, this purpose-driven decision enabled it to reshape itself, save on store space, and attract even more customers who were truly aligned with its purpose.
To stand a chance at addressing the challenges of our time, we need to rename the leadership that we teach, learn and practise, from “leadership” to “purpose-driven leadership”.
Transforming our educational systems and how we develop, reward and recognise our leaders will be how we achieve this, and in doing so, we will avert the leadership crisis that so many people think we are facing today.
PROF MUSHTAK AL-ATABI
Provost and chief executive officer
Heriot-Watt University Malaysia;
Chairman
Vice-Chancellors’ Council for Private Universities
