“Where Have All Leaders Gone?” Why Seriously Addressing this Global Leadership Crisis is the Only Way to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

The Global State of Leadership-A Growing Crisis

The Word Economic Forum hinted years ago that the world is facing a serious global leadership crisis. Before then, many scholars, global icons in the world of leadership thinking, philosophy, theory and practice had warned of huge leadership vaccums in many organisations across the world, with serious deficiencies experienced in the profit-making organisations, politics, environment and development issues, in economies and in politics spaces and even in not-for profit organisations. Sadly, because few people invest time in understanding and determining just how serious leadership or lack of it has an impact on sustainable social and economic development and in sustainable environmental and natural resources management, these dire warning remain unattended. This is despite leaders and their leadership or non-leadership are estimated to account for (15 percent directly and 35 percent indirectly) as much as fifty percent to the success or failure of the organisations or institutions they lead, whether they be governments, economies, companies, organisations, countries, continents or even teams. Parallel research specifically on chief executive officers, who in many institutions and organisational settings are what I call either Level One Leaders or Level Two Leaders, are estimated to account for between 20 percent and 50 percent to the success of their organisations. 

Defining the Leadership Crisis

According to the World Economic Crisis’ definition, the global leadership crisis is characterised by a huge disparity between leadership power, leadership authority, leadership responsibility and leadership competence. In other words, the organisation argues, there are many situations in organisations and institutions around the world where there is a huge leadership competence deficit where people in positions of leadership wield power and authority but lack in responsibility and competence. This observation has been cited by many authorities on leadership with some providing graphic and irrefutable evidence of this huge disparity. Examples of such leadership authorities include the late Stephen R. Covey, Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis, Professor Michael Porter, Richard Rumelt, Gray Hamel, C.K Parahalad, Ram Charan, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner and others.  

I will add another dimension of global leadership here. In the 21st Century where we are talking about sustainable development, many leaders at all levels of in organisations around the world still lack in the sustainable development dimension which I would say is synonymous with global leadership. I would then define global leadership as 

“The capacities and competencies in viewing leadership from a global perspective, that is taking into account sustainability issues in the leadership of their companies, organisations, businesses, business units, economies, countries, continents, institutions or societies. The adopting and developing sustainability thinking is the first critical step in developing global leadership capacity and capabilities.” 

By using this definition of global leadership, the challenges we are facing in gaining serious and sustainable traction in action on sustainable development goals become very obvious. There is a serious deficiency in sustainability thinking among many leaders around the world. Without sustainability thinking at the centre of their leaders, many leaders remain thinking and operating at their organisational or local level and fail to think of their organisations and institutions and also their personal leadership decisions and actions within the context of global whole and the sustainable development of the world. This is exactly why there is almost total lack of mainstreaming or integration of sustainable development goals in companies, organisational and businesses and why many countries are still struggling to strike the code in terms of sustainable and effective implementation and pursuit of sustainable development goals both and national and local levels. 

Another dimension of global leadership, I would say, is generally thinking within a wider context beyond a leader’s traditional or designated leadership domain or being interested on wider-context issues. I would also call this whole system thinking; taking into account that leaders and the people and organisations they lead are part of bigger system, a global system beyond their geographical or domain, or contextual boundaries. 

Does Leadership Make a Difference in Performance, Results and Success?

Those who do not fully understand the dynamics of organisational performance may argue against these percentages on the superfluous impression of the impossibility of an individual having such a disproportionate contribution to the performance, results, success and failure especially of an organisation with hundreds of people and, worse still, of a whole country with millions of people. Yet just take one elements out of the around twenty-one key results areas of real leadership, which is decisions, and you realise just how this is so. For example, just one bad or dangerous decision by one leader can bring a holocaust to an organisation, company or economy while one great decision by one leader can have an unbelievable fantastic outcome for a company, business or economy.  

At the time of writing this article, we are experiencing a ravaging war between Russia and Ukraine. That war is a result of decisions made by the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. If the two leaders had made different decisions, the war would not have happened. Yet look at the devastating impacts of the war on Ukraine and the whole world;

• Tens of thousands, nearly running into hundreds of thousands of people have lost their lives

• Millions of people have lost everything they worked for, have lost their homes and displaced from their homeland of Ukraine

• Billions of Ukraine’s economic assets have gone up in smokes or razed to rubble

• Billions of United States Dollars is cash, assets and resources from around the world have been diverted from other causes to fund the war in Ukraine. This resources are no longer available to address other global challenges

• Global supply of food and energy has been rattled if not shaken, increasing the levels of hunger and vulnerability to hunger of many of the world’s poorest people

• Focus and attention is diverted from other pressing global issues such as climate action.

• Bombs and missiles set up fires and generates copius amounts of gas emissions including carbon dioxide, thus negating the global climate goal of curbing greenhouse gas emissions. 

• The global sustainable development and in the countries at war, and especially for Ukraine, has been dragged into the negative since some resources that were to benefit future generations are being used to sustain the war and more will be used to rebuild what has been destroyed.

Leadership Performance, Leadership Training and the Leadership Crisis

Results of researches on the impact of leadership training and development on leadership performance are disturbing if not depressing. Just in the United States of America alone, tens to hundreds of billions of United States Dollars are invested into leadership development efforts and only 10% of such investment yields positive results in terms improvement in leadership performance; a whooping 90 percent of these huge spent goes to waste. Many researchers have been raising the flag on the ineffectiveness of most traditional approaches to leadership development for years, and the number of such researchers continue to rise and their voices growing even louder and yet they remain like John the Baptist calling for repentance and no one listening.

 The dismal failure of the traditional leadership performance improvement and transformation approaches many people around the world cling dearly is not surprising. One of the loopholes was discovered a long time ago by one Dr Kirkpatrick through his research on training and its failure. To be more precise, Dr Kirkpatrick deduced that over 75 percent of training effort produces nothing. He gave the reasons for such a failure including the failure of workplace practice and reinforcement of the training after the trainees take some training. In my experience with “training” this is true. Many organisations focus almost exclusively on the training event and ignore the process. To many, training is over as soon as the classroom session is over. Also in my experience, many leaders in organisations are not deeply interested in the training of their subordinates or teams. They do not see it as something they must be deeply and directly concerned with but instead as the business of the HR guy or lady. 

Dr Kirkpatrick’s finding are valid, yet there is a more serious thinking mistake that I personally discovered in my research on individual, team and organisational performance. 

Many people confuse training, teaching and development. Over 75 percent of what is being called leadership “training” around the world is not training but teaching. Teaching is important, but teaching improves or increases knowledge but not skills. Real training imparts, increases or improves skills, the undertaking of specific mental or physical tasks. You must not expect a direct improvement of leadership skills from basic teaching unless the teaching is then applied to improve or change performance. In fact, the mistaking of leadership teaching as leadership training leads to increase knowledge but without any significant improvement in leadership skills. Skills have a direct link to leadership performance and leadership results.

Leadership Has Completely Change. Abandon the Old Leadership Paradigm and Embrace the New Paradigm.

Leadership development is a different domain altogether. Many so called leadership development programs are flawed in context, concepts, content and clarity. There are two concepts that are related but different; leadership development and leader development. Leader development is about the person who is expected to lead or who is in a leadership position. Leadership development is about the theory and practice of leadership within the wider context of an organisation or economy or society or country. In addition, there is difference between leader training, leader teaching and leader development. The greatest and most impactful benefits come from leader development compared to leader teaching and leader training. Leader teaching helps but it has the least contribution to changes in leadership performance compared to leader training and leader development. The best results come from a balanced and strategic combination of leadership development and leader teaching, training and development. This is not what is happening in most organisations around the world and the result is a leadership crisis. 

Abandoning the Traditional Approaches to Leadership Performance Improvement

The traditional general approach to efforts to improve leadership performance where people are passed through a canned, off the shelf, once-off, ad-hoc, one size fits all people in all situations and circumstances, “leadership course” does not yield much. I agree there are some such ones off powerful leadership seminars or courses that trigger major shifts and transformations, but their impact is that when they awaken the participants to new perspectives on leadership and when they can trigger desire and interest to start a serious process of continuous personal leadership growth, training, education and development. Very few leaders and organisations are interested in a well-structured, developmental leadership programs that cover all the key areas that contribute to leadership performance and that combine training, learning and development. Many oganisations are also stuck in the old leadership paradigms that do not take into accounts the drastically changed leadership contexts, content, concepts, challenges, theory, teaching, training, philosophies and practice. Leadership is no longer what it used to be pre21st Century. Gone are the days of a few leaders being led by one overpowering top leader with many sleep walking, order following followers. Great leaders are leading other leader leaders. 

Leadership content and concepts have changed and it is now much easier to lead if one is humble enough to learn and change. Many people in position of leadership now seriously lag behind the big shifts in leading and leadership and without shifting to the new leadership paradigm, such leaders endanger themselves and people and organisations that they lead. Let us address the leadership crisis and trigger a massive transformation in the progress towards making sustainable develop a reality. 

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©Simon Bere, 2022