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Training leaders for the twenty-first century
TRAINING LEADERS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Jay A. Conger McGill University
As we prepare to enter the twenty-first century, there are two forces whose accelerating pace will alter fundamentally how organizations will be effectively led. They are: (1) dramatically heightened competitive pressures and (2) significant changes in the backgrounds and needs of employees. This article examines the critical competencies that will be required by the next generation of corporate leaders to successfully address these challenges. It proposes approaches as to how we might train and develop these.
Jack Welch, Chairman of the General Electric Company, is fond of saying that
the 1990’s will make the 1980’s look like a walk in the park. Yet with the accelerating pace of technological change and the rise of new economic super powers such as China and Korea, we may well remember the 1990’s as themselves another walk in the park compared to what awaits us in the twenty-first century. It is certainly clear that change is now accelerating at an almost geometric rate in the world of business today and will continue to do so well into the next century. To manage our organizations through this period of dramatic turbulence, we will need exceptional leadership at all levels. Pressures from the marketplace and from within organizations will be too intense to beat a retreat to the chains of command and hierarchies of the past. And the magnitude of coming changes will not only demand more leadership but newer forms of it. Existing models of leadership will quickly be outdated. Just as importantly, our approaches to developing leaders will have to change. For this very reason, we must begin to revisit with a critical eye the competencies of
future leaders and our current methods for training and developing them. We must begin now because the training investments we make in a young manager today will not become fully apparent until some two decades later when they reach senior leadership posts. Given this time horizon, skills trained today will become easily outdated, and teaching young managers yesterday’s leadership skills can only put them at that much of a greater disadvantage. Direct all correspondence
to: Jay A. Conger, McGill University, Samuel Bronfman Building. 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, IQ, Canada H3A lG5.
Human Resource Management Review, Volume 3, Number 3.1993, pages 203-218 AI1 rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Copyright Q 1993 by JAI Press, Inc. ISSN:1053-4822
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To seriously address this issue, we face, however, several major dilemmas. The first is that leadership development has been in most companies a haphazard process. For example, during the hiring process of young recruits, a few leadership qualities might be considered at best. Later in one’s career, managers may attend a seminar or two on the subject, and a career path program might offer occasional leadership experiences. But the idea of a more serious and systematic approach has been largely neglected. And while investments in leadership training are up, only limited attention has been paid to whether we are headed in the right direction. A close look at current training approaches reveals that many of these programs still focus on leadership paradigms of the past with only limited appreciation for dramatically different approaches (Conger 1992). But the first step must be to determine what the future demands on leaders will be and then to discover the means to develop these. Given the author’s expertise, we will focus largely on the training side of these competenties in this article, but this is only one of many developmental approaches that must be employed (McCall 1992).
LEADERSHIP
COMPETENCIES
FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
To understand the competencies demanded of twenty-first century leaders, we must start with the business landscape of the future where two primary forces are already altering the nature of organizations as we know them. They are: (1) dramatically heightened competitive pressures, and (2) significant changes in the backgrounds and needs of employees. Since the 1970’s with the rise of Japan and Germany, competitive pressures worldwide have been building like a cyclone. This is most evident in the wide range of products from which consumers can select. A single statistic from the automobile industry illustrates the magnitude of this change. In 1958, U.S. consumers could choose only 21 different models of cars from ten different manufacturers. By 1989, they could choose from 167 models by twenty-five different manufacturers. This is due largely to two interrelated factors: the rise of new world economic powers (e.g., Germany, Japan) and increasing wealth globally for consumers. These factors are fueling an international business war from which there will be no near-term let-up. If anything, with China’s growing wealth and Korea’s push into technological industries, this war will intensity. These global competitive battles are largely responsible for many of the changes that today’s leaders are attempting to manage. For example, fierce competition has meant an ever increasing scramble for markets through innovative company strategies and through higher quality products and services. In addition, competition has brought us the three year idea-to-product life cycle for automobiles and the incredible concerns for cost management and just-in-time inventory. It has pushed companies to search for markets far outside their homelands. Finally, competition (and the advent of computer technology) has forced organizations to flatten their hierarchies and to decentralize decision-making so that they can respond with speed to their rivals’
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actions. These marketplace forces will have significant implications for future leaders. Specifically, to manage effectively in this sea of competition, future leaders at all levels will have to become: 1. Strategic opportunists; 2. Globally aware; and 3. Capable of managing highly decentralized organizations. While we will explore each of these competencies in a moment, suffice it to say for now, today’s approaches to leadership development in these areas are woefully inadequate. For example, the development of strategic competence comes late in the careers of most managers, and then only after years of narrow functional experiences that seriously stunt a true strategic perspective. International experience, until recently, has been a low status opportunity for many fast-track managers taking them away from the networks of the power structure and from visibility for their achievements. On the training side, the average company program has spent little time on strategy skills, little or no time on international issues, and addressed the complexities of decentralized organizations with mostly simple participative decision-making exercises. Preparation then for these key competencies is frightfully poor. In addition to the tidal wave of marketplace pressures, there is another, equally powerful, set of forces coming from within organizations that are shaking up the old competencies of leadership. This set of forces is the by-product of a fundamental shift occurring in the composition of the workforce in the Western World. It is estimated that by the year 2000 fewer than ten percent of North Americans entering the workforce (for their first job) will be white, Anglo-Saxon males. Women and minority groups will comprise the vast majority of future employees (Johnson 1991). They will bring with them a different set of needs and concerns than today’s white males who currently populate the tops of our corporate hierarchies. In addition, a significant percentage of these new employees will be immigrants who have limited education. These individuals will be operating the high-tech factories of the future with a potential outcome of creating a newly emerging caste structure where elites of well educated individuals direct employees who have problems with their English and simple math. But the workforce will not only be more diverse but also one that is less tolerant of the interpersonal weaknesses of their superiors. With the increasing emphasis on organizational behavior in management schools, the appearance of employee rights acts, and a greater public awareness of “effective” interpersonal behavior (due to the popularity of psychotherapy and self-help books), subordinates will expect their leaders to be more interpersonally competent. Those who are not will face a host of barriers to being truly influential as organizational leaders. This shift, however, is only a manifestation of something more profound and
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fundamental-the increasing importance of the workplace as a person’s primary community in life. For example, just a century ago, an individual’s family, their hometown, and their church played vital roles as sources of community and well-being. Today this is no longer the case. Divorce, increased mobility, civic apathy, urban alienation, and disillusionment with organized religion have all contributed to the decline of these communities. Increasingly, individuals will bring the needs originally met by the family, civic, and religious communities to their workplace. The lack of organizational loyalty that we see among employees is in part a reflection of a deeper resentment felt towards companies that poorly address needs for meaning and community. Specifically, these workforce trends will demand that leaders of the future be: 1. Sensitive to issues of diversity; 2. Interpersonally competent; and 3. Community builders. Despite the growing importance of these competencies, the majority of managers are not adequately prepared for them. For example, current training approaches have only recently begun to address their development-especially in terms of the diversity and community-building issues (Conger 1992). Interpersonal skills is the one area where many of today’s programs are strong and have been strong for several decades. But even here questions might be raised about the long-term effectiveness of the current interpersonal skills approaches. For while they have been around for a long time, we might fairly ask whether we see an interpersonally more competent managerial workforce today? Perhaps not-given the history and relative size of the investment in such training. In summary, these are the six competencies that tomorrow’s leaders will require-three are by-products of the marketplace, and three are by-products of a changing workforce. The pressing question, however, is how might we best approach the development of these competencies for tomorrow’s leaders from a training perspective.
THE MARKETPLACE
COMPETENCIES
The Strategic Leader Future leaders will be under enormous pressures to find the strategic opportunities that their competitors have yet to find. This means not only looking more closely at home markets but outside. It also implies searching for internal strategic opportunities to improve quality, service, and prices. Because greater market share and profitability will come only through identifying and meeting customer needs, leaders of the future will have to have a
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keener understanding of their clients. They will have to remain constantly in touch with their markets. Great political and religious leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King succeeded because they identified so closely with the needs of their followers. Business leaders of the future will have to develop a similar mindset. The question that leaders will ask themselves in the 1990’s and beyond will be “How do I get my customers to follow me?” As a result, training will have to put managers far more in touch with their customers by actively involving clients in training programs and sending company managers into learning projects which take them out to experiences in the field dealing directly with clients. But increased customer exposure is not sufficient in itself to develop a true strategic sense. Along with a profound appreciation for long range thinking, rather training must emphasize a breadth of perspective on future markets and competitors alike. For while leaders will continue to be under short-term pressures to innovate, they will simultaneously be under far greater pressure to look long-range. This split will become much more acute than it currently is. Japan, Korea, and Germany are investing significantly for the long-term while the United States and Canada continue to focus on the near term and slash longer term R&D expenditures to cut costs. This lag will show itself in product introductions in the mid to late 1990s where we can expect to see especially dramatic gains by the Japanese and Koreans in new products. Our future leaders will have to resist the short-term by carefully targeting limited resources and by thinking far more strategically for the long-term. This challenge, however, will pose a serious dilemma. Our current crop of future leaders is growing up through a series of jobs which focus on and reward short-range thinking. In addition, our business community still remains concerned about the next quarter’s earnings. These forces will mitigate against the development of a long range, strategic focus. Training must counter these forces by providing “think-tank” opportunities for reflection on long-term strategy. In addition, it must immerse managers in a wealth of information and debate on future demographic, economic and geo-political trends. Finally, job rotation across a range of functions and markets at early stages in a manager’s career will be necessary to overcome this shortsightedness (McCall 1992). The context within which strategy training takes place will also have to change. Currently, most strategy training is now being taught at a some distance from the marketplace-largely through university programs which more often than not employ case studies of strategic issues as the means of instruction. While effective in teaching generic concepts about strategy-making, this approach faces two common dilemmas. The first is that many of the case studies deal with issues in other industries unrelated to the participant’s business. This is the principle reason why we are seeing more and more in-house company programs or university programs customized to a single company. Organizations want classrooms built around their own firm and industry. The second dilemma already alluded to is that case instruction itself remains one step removed from the actual marketplace. There are few reality checks on classroom generated solutions. As a result, a deeper appreciation for strategic
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issues must be complemented through action learning processes which take participants out into the field. It is one thing to decide in a classroom that a company should enter a new market and another to actually attempt to do it. Through a case study, a young manager can have only a limited sense of the complexities and implementation efforts required to think and act strategically. This is most effectively achieved through actual experiences. Action learning (where participants either bring with them or are provided real strategic business problems facing their own companies to analyze and devise action plans) can duplicate in structured learning environments “real-time” experiences by using company strategic issues as the learning context (for example, see Noel & Charan 1988). In addition, action learning provides an educational structure within which a manager can reflect, critique and learn from an undertaking. It frees participants from the pressures of a normal business day where there is little time to integrate learnings and from organizational norms which might otherwise blindside participants’ breadth of learning. Learning by doing in controlled experiences as these will increasingly become the educational wave of the future. The only barrier to their more widespread use will be the cost and the more complex logistics that are involved-two significant hurdles. We will discover, however, one important pitfall to action learning as it becomes more widespread. Since companies are actively involved in the process, they may unconsciously put invisible blinders on their participants through their own world views. For example, instead of challenging current assumptions about a company’s strategy or its marketplace, action learning may continue to reinforce existing assumptions since company projects are selected by the existing management. Just as significantly, participants’ analyses are subjected to critiques by company managers who may only further affirm their organization’s world view (essentially a process of socialization). For this reason, action learning programs of the future will have to involve more outsiders or company mavericks who can effectively challenge company perspectives. We can also expect to see the increased influence of new learning techniques in strategy training. There will be experiments with different mediums to push participants into looking beyond established company world views-to challenge assumptions that led to success in the past but today are perhaps outdated. This will become one of the primary training challenges in the 1990s and beyond-innovative systems and techniques to uncover and challenge organizational world views. One experiment attempting to address this challenge is being conducted at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina where a new program, LeaderLab, uses art and visualization processes to expand participants’ abilities to capture more comprehensively the dilemmas they are facing (Burnside & Guthrie 1991). The objective is to force participants beyond their words and rational minds-on the assumption that we have all too well rehearsed how we explain and solve our current situations. As such, our rationality limits the ability to see options while art and visualization force us out of the mind and
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into considering issues from a new sense of creativity and potential breadth. In the end, experiments such as these may prove to be the next “snake-oil” of training, but at this stage we must encourage the exploration of these new learning processes. Among them, we may find approaches that are truly effective. A final problem to be faced is the tendency to reserve strategy training for senior executive levels. With greater de-centralization, strategy-making in the 1990s will have to be pushed further down the hierarchy. Junior managers must be exposed early on to strategic decision-making experiences. Based on anecdotal evidence from executive education programs at various universities, it appears that the conceptual and strategic skills of young managers are, at best, of uneven quality today. This is due largely to their confinement within narrow functional tracks or stovepipes. As a result, by the time they reach the executive suite they have had few opportunities to develop a strategic competence and perspective. Yet, many are increasingly being called upon to be more strategic in their actions. The Global Leader
While most North American companies compete internationally, many still fail to appreciate the critical nuances of managing and selling abroad (Adler 1991). Naivete remains widespread. Yet given that the growth markets for this decade will be in Asia and perhaps Europe, it is imperative that we move quickly to understand these markets. As professor of management Ian Mitroff (1987) noted, “For all practical purposes, all business today is global. Those individual businesses, firms, industries and whole societies that clearly understand the new rules of doing business in a world economy will prosper; those who do not will perish” (p. ix). And not only will future growth come from these markets but future financing as well. Practically all of the ten largest banks in the world today are Japanese. As a result, your banker today is just as likely to be Japanese as American. In addition, companies will be scouring the globe looking for new knowledge or talent to provide competitive advantage as new products or production innovations will no longer be found just at home but in other countries. Finally, success in tomorrow’s global environment will require highly specialized yet tightly linked teams of global business managers, regional managers, and world-wide functional managers forming what is called the transnational organization (Bartlett & Ghoshal 1989). These networks of managers will be directed by executives who themselves understand the differing demands and skills of each group and can manage their often conflicting concerns. In sum, to manage these transnational organizations and an increasing number of joint ventures with foreigners, the next generation of leaders will have to become very sophisticated. Future leaders at both the mid- and senior management levels will therefore need to possess an understanding of foreign financial markets, of global economics and organizations, and of geo-political forces. Training will have to take managers into the minds of foreign markets
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and political arenas and into the complexities of managing others across a multitude of foreign boundaries and cultures. The first step in developing such unique leadership competencies must come from comprehensive early career-track programs that provide for overseas assignments. As well, training opportunities must be created to implement action learning projects in foreign countries. It will be only through first-hand implementation that managers will learn the many critical nuances of international business. One example of an experiment in this direction is the Global Leadership Program developed by Professor Noel Tichy at the University of Michigan. What makes this program special is that it attempts to teach an understanding of both global and strategic issues through action learning in unique “classrooms”. Participants in teams are taken to Brazil, India, or China (locations vary with programs) where they begin a two-week study mission identifying business opportunities. They experience first-hand what are the dilemmas and opportunities of potential new markets. The Brickler Bulletin describes the experience: “Affected by unanticipated political events, frustrated by bureaucratic red tape, or incapacitated by unfamiliar cuisine, the teams struggled to evaluate the long-term business potential of a foreign market while they were being forced to resolve cultural differences among team members. The teams toured businesses and met with corporate leaders and political oficials, and, in order to better understand the real nature of the host country, they visited typical homes and local market places, traveling by public transportation” CT.Albright 1990).
To insure maximum leverage from these experiences, companies must beforehand target their high growth markets for the future. These must become the regions where international training and work experiences are provided for young managers. Experiences in Kenya will be of limited value if the organization’s future growth is in China. While seemingly obvious, many companies still employ the “State Department” mentality of believing that any form of international experience is useful. Cultures are so specific that companies need to maximize their investment by sending their future leaders to learn in the highest future potential markets. Where logistics are too complex or costs too high for “on location” training, companies may wish to use actors trained in the nuances of other cultures to simulate the dilemmas that a manager must face in managing or negotiating within a particular country. Often just as effectively, classrooms can be composed of participants from many cultures. Simulations and exercises may be designed so that the cultural assumptions and biases of each participant play themselves out in view of others so that participants ultimately become teachers for one another. In addition, structured time for shared reflections on how cultural differences manifest themselves in the classroom interactions will add significant value to these learning experiences.
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The Post-Hierarchical Leader Given the needs for quick responses to markets along with the instantaneous distribution and availability of knowledge thanks to computer technology, our organizations’ hierarchies are collapsing into cross-functional project and process teams. Leaders will have multiple teams reporting to them in addition to their functional subordinates. In the transnational corporations, these teams will span nations as well. This means that the traditional role of the leader as “the boss” will be challenged. The leader will increasingly become a coordinator, coach, and consultant. In addition, a leader’s span of control will expand dramatically. Whereas two decades ago, it was believed that four to five direct reports was ideal, today a span of control involving ten to twelve direct reports is not uncommon. The computer now sitting on a manager’s desk allows him or her to monitor a growing number of individuals with unparalleled efficiency. Further, a greater reliance on outside suppliers, “outside workers” (working at home), and on a growing number of strategic alliances with other companies will demand that leaders possess exceptional networking and coordinating skills. The increasing emphasis on teams and alliances of many forms will encourage leaders to play more supportive than directive roles. This, however, will pose a serious dilemma during critical moments requiring strong directive action. Future leaders may instead find themselves reluctant to provide a strong overarching direction-anxious that such activity might undermine their consultative relationship. This will be reinforced by the growing aversion towards formal authority felt by younger generations (Light 1988; Kiechel 1989). The problem will be compounded when leaders must manage multicultural groups where expectations for leaderhsip may range from consensusbuilding leadership styles to more directive and autocratic styles. So future leaders will be presented with a paradox. For while many employees will want their leaders to be less directive on a day-to-day basis, they will look to their leaders as never before for overall direction and reassurance due to the sea of never-ending changes that their companies must face. As a result, the leader’s overall role as a source of stability and control over the future will remain. The dilemma, as Rosabeth Moss Ranter (19891 has commented, is that the demands on managers and executives will be for them to “become passionately dedicated to ‘visions’ and fanatically committed to carrying them out-but be flexible, responsive, and able to change direction quickly . . .” The outcome will be that leaders must “speak-up, be a leader, set the direction-but be participative, listen well, and cooperate” (pp. 20-21). In terms of training, most of today’s programs are aware of these challenges and dilemmas. They point out the necessity of team work and offer experiential exercises in team building. But these teamwork simulations are generally very simplistic and fail to capture the real-world complexities. Moreover, current programs fall dramatically short on addressing the dilemmas of managing the growing number of outside relationships and alliances (Conger 1992).
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In addition, if the future belongs to the cross-functional or process team, then leaders in the most advantageous positions will be those who are keenly aware of individual functional competencies and know how to manage their vested interests. Simultaneously, they must be able to maintain a broad multifunctional perspective on their product or service processes. Unfortunately, few of today’s training courses are helpful here. While an MBA program can provide some understanding of the needs of the various functions and processes, classroom learning in general has serious limits in this area. A theory or a case study cannot compare to the reality of managing a cross-functional team under tight deadlines and limited resources and against often strongly vested interests. Successful companies can best begin the education process by creating cross-functional work experiences early in a manager’s career (Kotter 1990). Action learning programs which demand significant cross-functional exposure for participants can also be used to reinforce further learning. The increasing decentralization and entrepreneurship that will characterize organizations of the future will likely mean that persuasive communication skills will be the next wave in leadership training. Because of collapsing hierarchies and growing resistance to the power of one’s position or title, formal authority will be less effective in directing and mobilizing staff. A leader’s success will in part be determined by their ability to motivate through words and through the strength of their plans and goals. Leaders will in essence become like “candidates” running for office. Those who can best sell their “platforms” will garner the greatest support and following. This is where traditional skill building classroom approaches may play a role as many communication skills are teachable. The challenge will be to open participants’ capacity for inspirational and rhetorical expressiveness and to develop their abilities at formulating an enticing logic and a rich meaning to their descriptions of company undertakings or projects that they sincerely believe in.
THE WORKFORCE
COMPETENCIES
The Diversity Leader
In addition to the cross-cultural issues of managing overseas operations, tomorrow’s leaders will be managing many different ethnic groups (Morrison 1992). A keener understanding of the issues surrounding diversity and an increasing tolerance of diverse viewpoints will be a critical requirement. Capturing the essential dilemmas posed by this diversity, Burnside and Guthrie (1991) comment that: A crucial issue for leaders today is how to deal effectively with groups that have different values and world views Increasing diversity, however, is not just an ethnic issue. It is a cognitive one as well. It is present in increasing tolerance for diversity of viewpoints. Just a generation ago, employees operated primarily on the expectation that they would do as their organiza-
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tions requested-move when asked, for example. Conformity of views to the organizational line was expected. Now, however, there is a decreasing expectation that employees will conform to organizational norms. Employees feel more freedom to disagree with management and to say no to requests to move if it does not fit their expectations. Thus, we can say that there is a kind of fragmentation of shared views, or norms. It is due in part to work groups being composed of individuals who do not share a common cultural upbringing. . .‘(p. 13).
These forces are similar to those posed by the decentralized organization in that they will increase the tension between employees wishing to be led on the one hand and wishing to lead themselves on the other. The more a leader represents the interests and goals of a single group or faction, the greater the resistance from the other groups will be. So the challenge facing this next generation of leaders will be to create plans and goals that incorporate the needs of diverse groups such that all feel a sense of ownership. Not an easy task. On a more basic level, workforce diversity means that faux pas’ of the past such as the casual sexist remark or the off-the-cuff joke about a particular ethnic group will no longer be acceptable and will raise serious questions about a manager’s credibility. Leaders will be tested in the little actions of day-to-day work to see if they are respectful of the concerns and traditions of a particular gender or ethnic group. Training must therefore incorporate a greater educational content on the issues and concerns of specific ethnic and gender groups. Information on demographic trends, on common dilemmas that a particular group faces in the workplace, on management approaches that engender negative reactions, must all be part of a comprehensive education program. In the optimum case, classroom simulations and exercises should be designed to trigger common diversity issues so that participants can see firsthand the areas or practices where they need to be more sensitive and aware. Field projects where a manager works with an ethnic group with whom he or she has little familiarity can provide an effective context for learning. Moreover, classrooms composed of a diverse mix of participants and trainers themselves are likely to stimulate rich learning experiences if the educational lens of the program is in part focused on these issues. So for example, wherever possible, participants for programs should be selected on the basis of their diversity-their culture, race, gender, faith, and so forth. A good example of unexpected potential educational outcomes is captured by one incident that I myself witnessed. Participants were involved in a program that was divided into two week-long segments-each separated by several months. Just before the second phase of the course, all the men in the group had contacted one another about a golf game on the Saturday before the course began. The women had not been contacted-the men’s shared assumption was that women usually do not play golf. Needless to say, this omission by the men caused significant resentment which surfaced in one session. The class debate that followed was a powerful learning experience about the dilemmas of diversity
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and mistaken assumptions. The male managers left with a profound appreciation of how their assumptions and behaviors had gotten them into a serious dilemma.
The Interpersonal
Leader
Increasingly, we will expect our leaders to be interpersonal role-models. This is particularly evident in the political arena where a candidate’s background and behavior are scrutinized for the slightest flaws. But some of this same attention is now being directed towards our company leaders-especially in terms of interpersonal skills. The popularity of self-help books and psychotherapy has heightened our expectations that our bosses and leaders will be “interpersonally correct.” Depending on the manager and their psychological make-up, interpersonal skill training can be either a straightforward case of step-by-step training or a more complex and diEcult learning process occurring on profound and therapeutic levels. For example, in the case of the former, there are training formats to learn active listening. On the other hand, a manager’s inability to listen may in reality have deep ties to childhood experiences which limit learning from such skills courses. In addition, common problems associated with technique training have been the limited time devoted to acquiring skills in the classroom and then the absence of follow-up coaching. On the same hand, training at the more profound and psychological levels has run into barriers because of concerns surrounding the high professional levels required of trainers and fears of tampering with the human psyche. While both are important concerns, more supportive and constructive environments could be created using highly skilled staff to facilitate deeper learning experiences. Coaching, however, is of paramount importance in this area of competencies, and its absence is a principal reason why interpersonal skills training in general is not as effective as it potentially could be. For no matter whether the training required is straightforward or profound, interpersonal skill development demands active and persistent coaching for new behaviors to take hold. Simply learning a set of techniques fails to recognize that these skills often demand a significant change in behavior that must be continually reinforced. Typically, such needs for coaching fail to be met, and the problem becomes more acute the moment after participants leave the classroom. Equally problematic is the fact that in a typical class of twenty-five, the time for serious coaching on a one-on-one basis is extremely limited. One possible solution to this dilemma is the process advisor system designed by the Center for Creative Leadership. In the ideal case, the process advisor is a psychologist who is versed in organizational issues. Their role as described by the LeaderLab program is “one of coach, advisor, friend, cop, advocate, behavioral scientist. This person must continually prod and encourage the participant to move ahead, to address issues and blocks, to understand how blocks get in the way, and to help in strategizing ways to move them or confront them” (Burnside & Guthrie 1991, p. 36).
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The advisor’s objective is to assist participants during training not only to design effective leadership action plans but to focus on behavioral changes that enhance effectiveness and then to provide follow-up support. This support becomes particularly critical when individuals are making major behavioral changes that are not the easiest nor most comfortable for them. Continual contact is the key to the success of the advisor system. It begins a month or so before the program with an introductory telephone call from the process advisor to assess the participant’s situation. While on the course, there are one-onone sessions with the advisor to craft the participant’s plan of action on their return to the job. During the three month break between the program’s two course sessions, the advisor maintains a monthly telephone link as well as for the two months following the final session. The purpose of the telephone link is to monitor the participant’s progress in addition to trouble-shooting in areas where little progress appears to have been made. To further heighten the effectiveness of these telephone meetings, each participant keeps a daily learning journal-the contents of which are forwarded onto the advisor prior to each telephone contact. This helps the advisor see the daily issues that the participant is facing. In addition, it forces participants to explore in far greater depth their situations -again encouraging greater reflection and learning. During the second session of the course, the process advisor holds a group session with the three participants to whom they have been assigned, and together they serve one another as resources to help identify the leadership improvements that participants wish to make and to identify actions that must be taken to improve. In these sessions, each participant presents an account of their progress-the successes and the barriers. These are evaluated with the process advisor and in the small groups in terms of major learnings to date, and afterwards the learnings are presented to a full class session. Further support and coaching for one’s behavioral change comes also in the form of change partners. There are two forms of these: in-course change partners and back-home change partners. The “in-course” change partners consist of three person teams who work together throughout the program. They are designed as a practice vehicle for involving peers in the participants’ leadership situations. Change partners must learn about each other and learn to work with one another. In many cases, they evolve into a support system for each other during the three month back-home period. The “back-home” change partners are individuals at the worksite whom participants feel can assist them as they try to improve their leadership situation. The program designers note that these back-home partners need to embody three qualities: “encouragement (someone to pat them on the shoulder and egg them on); wisdom (someone who had been through the changes similar to what the participant is attempting and knows their local situation); and truth (someone who will give them honest feedback about the impact of their changes) . . . Since no one person usually can provide all three things needed, the participant works with three or four people, getting at least.one thing from each of them. This is often a difficult task, and is one tool the Process Advisor tries to help the participant get established during the three-month period” (Burnside & Guthrie 1991, pp. 38-39).
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In summary, the change partners in combination with the process advisor provide the important missing link in leadership training-the coach. Before now, coaching might on rare occasion appear in the form of a manager back at the participant’s organization who had attended a similar program and who enjoyed mentoring. But this rarely if ever happens, and the coaching provided by training organizations typically ends the last day of a program. The process advisor idea, however, recognizes that if training is to play a truly deuelopmented role then it must provide coaching mechanisms which extend beyond the course itself-especially when they involve significant behavioral changes. In this case, the training organization assumes that responsibility rather the participant’s organization where much would be left to chance.
The Community
Leader
The last of the leadership competencies required for the future-community building-is along with strategic opportunism one of the absolute most important of the competencies but also one of the most difficult to teach. Community building is a unique talent. It involves two leadership skills that are widely talked about today-empowerment and vision. Both are intertwined since vision itself must be empowering to be truly effective and the nature of the vision’s purpose is not only to achieve a meaningful strategic or company goal but to build a dedicated community (Bennis & Nanus 1985). The important question is whether training can develop such skills. I have seen managers return from programs and more actively reward-which is an element of empowerment. This side of the equation can be taught. Yet an individual’s psychological make-up is the key to success on this dimension. Managers must feel secure in themselves to be truly empowering and to learn how to be empowering. A controlling manager cannot become an empowering manager without significant assistance. A program might cause an occasional break-through with a “disempowering” manager (Conger 19921, but generally speaking, it is highly unrealistic to expect that training will transform such individuals into empowering leaders. The second part of the community-building equation-vision-is far more difficult to train, especially in a one-time program. Vision is the by-product of experience, an openness to ideas and trends, and a sense of personal mission (Bennis & Nanus 1985; Conger 1989; Westley & Mintzberg 1988). What training can do is to create an awareness in managers of the need to seek in their careers the right mix of work experiences and to encourage thinking beyond their status quo. It can also provide participants with information on future demographic and other trends that might stimulate visionary thinking. Personal growth programs may assist a bit if they attempt to help participants find their passions, but this can backfire if discovered passions are unrelated to work or an individual simply has none (Conger 1993). Most importantly, community builders are often individuals who are driven by a deep esprit du corps. They are the ones who in college or on the job seem to pull everyone together for a special project. Their gift is that of the organizer. Most of us do not have this drive. Can you teach it? Probably not, Or at least by
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adulthood the chances are greatly diminished. Finding community builders must come more from selection and encouragement of those who already are.
CONCLUSION:
DEVELOPING
TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY LEADERS
The art of leadership development is still very much in its infancy. We are only just beginning to understand some of the potential tools and experiences that are needed to help managers in more fully realizing their leadership potential. We are also only just beginning to appreciate the care and attention needed to nurture leadership. Up until now, organizations have taken the Darwinian path-the fittest will somehow emerge as leaders. But a great price is paid by this approach-much talent is lost or remains forever under-developed. Just as in the world of impresarios and star athletes, training and development activities are crucial to realizing the potential of future leaders. The following comment by McCall (1993) captures the issues we must face: Not everyone is cut out to be a leader,much less a leader in the turbulent corporate environment of the years ahead. Not everyone is cut out to be a great pianist or an Olympic runner either, but there is a significant lesson in the difference. When great talents are found in these spheres, they are trained and nurtured. To be sure, they enter challenging competitions relative to their current level of development, but each such trial is viewed as a learning event, to be critiqued and learned from. Typical corporate practice stands in start contrast: take promising talent, throw it into tough assignments, stand back, and watch what happens. Survivors, it is assumed, must have “the right stuff” or must have learned by virtue of having the experience. But no great pianist or runner, no matter how naturally gifted, has achieved greatness without years of practice, learning, dedication, and sacrifice (Bloom 1985). Similar hard work is at the core of developing leadership attributes (McCall, Lombardo, & Morrison 1988). It is not survival of the fittest that counts; it is development of the fittest. Organizations, then, face two substantial challenges if they hope to have effective leaders: they must identify those who have the potential to acquire the abilities described earlier, and they must nurture them as tenaciously and carefully as they would nurture any other precious resource critical to success (pp. 274-275). A great challenge awaits us. Both educators and organizations must take increasingly responsibility for growing leading-edge leaders. Educators must themselves learn to be open to new paradigms and to new training approaches. Organizations must move away from seeing leadership training programs as a quick-fix answer to growing leaders. They must also acknowledge and then abandon the sense of greater security they feel with managers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Portions of this article are excerpted from J. A. Conger’s 1993 “The Brave New World of Leadership Training.” In Organizational Dynamics, Winter. New York: American Management Association.
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REFERENCES Adler, N. J. 1991. International Dimensions of Organizational Behavior. Boston, MA: Kent Publishers. Albright, T. 1990. “Michigan’s Global Leadership Program Looks at 1990.” The Brickler Bulletin. Princeton, NJ. Bartlett, C. A. and S. Ghoshal. 1989. Managing Across Borders. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Bennis, W. G. and B. Nanus. 1985. Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins. Bloom, B. S. 1985. “Generalizations About Talent Development.” Pp. 107-149 in Deueloping Talented Young People, edited by B. S. Bloom. New York: Balantine. Burnside, R. M. and V. A. Guthrie. 1991. Developing Creative Leaders for the TwentyFirst Century. Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership. Conger, J. A. 1989. The Charismatic Leader. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. -. 1992. Learning to Lead. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. -. 1993. “Personal Growth Training: Snake-Oil or Pathway to Leadership.” Organizational Dynamics, (Summer): 19-30. Johnson, W. W. 1991. “Global. Work Force 2000.” Harvard Business Review (MarchApril): 115-127. Kanter, R. 1989. When Elephants Learn to Dance. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kiechel, W. 1989. “The Workaholic Generation.” Fortune (April 10). Kotter, J. P. 1990. A Force for Change. New York: Free Press. Light, P. 1988. Baby Boomers. New York: Norton. McCall, M. W. 1992. “Executive Development as a Business Strategy.” The Journal of Business Strategy (January-February): 25-31. 1993. “Developing Leadership.” Pp. 256-284 in Organizing for the Future., ed-. ited by J. R. Galbraith, and E. E. Lawler. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass. McCall, M. W., M. M. Lombard0 and A. Morrison. 1988. Lessons of Experience. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books. Mitroff, I. I. 1987. Business Not as Usual. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Morrison, A. N. 1992. The New Leaders. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Noel, J. L. and R. Charan. 1988. “Leadership Development at GE’s Crotonville.” Human Resource Management 27(4): 433-447. Westley, F. R. and H. Mintzberg. 1988. “Profiles of Strategic Vision: Levesque and Iaccoca.” Pp. 161-212 in Charismatic Leadership, edited by J. A. Conger and R. N. Kanungo. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
As we prepare to enter the twenty-first century, there are two forces whose accelerating pace will alter fundamentally how organizations will be effectively led. They are: (1) dramatically heightened competitive pressures and (2) significant changes in the backgrounds and needs of employees. This article examines the critical competencies that will be required by the next generation of corporate leaders to successfully address these challenges. It proposes approaches as to how we might train and develop these.
Jack Welch, Chairman of the General Electric Company, is fond of saying that
the 1990’s will make the 1980’s look like a walk in the park. Yet with the accelerating pace of technological change and the rise of new economic super powers such as China and Korea, we may well remember the 1990’s as themselves another walk in the park compared to what awaits us in the twenty-first century. It is certainly clear that change is now accelerating at an almost geometric rate in the world of business today and will continue to do so well into the next century. To manage our organizations through this period of dramatic turbulence, we will need exceptional leadership at all levels. Pressures from the marketplace and from within organizations will be too intense to beat a retreat to the chains of command and hierarchies of the past. And the magnitude of coming changes will not only demand more leadership but newer forms of it. Existing models of leadership will quickly be outdated. Just as importantly, our approaches to developing leaders will have to change. For this very reason, we must begin to revisit with a critical eye the competencies of
future leaders and our current methods for training and developing them. We must begin now because the training investments we make in a young manager today will not become fully apparent until some two decades later when they reach senior leadership posts. Given this time horizon, skills trained today will become easily outdated, and teaching young managers yesterday’s leadership skills can only put them at that much of a greater disadvantage. Direct all correspondence
to: Jay A. Conger, McGill University, Samuel Bronfman Building. 1001 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, IQ, Canada H3A lG5.
Human Resource Management Review, Volume 3, Number 3.1993, pages 203-218 AI1 rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
Copyright Q 1993 by JAI Press, Inc. ISSN:1053-4822
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To seriously address this issue, we face, however, several major dilemmas. The first is that leadership development has been in most companies a haphazard process. For example, during the hiring process of young recruits, a few leadership qualities might be considered at best. Later in one’s career, managers may attend a seminar or two on the subject, and a career path program might offer occasional leadership experiences. But the idea of a more serious and systematic approach has been largely neglected. And while investments in leadership training are up, only limited attention has been paid to whether we are headed in the right direction. A close look at current training approaches reveals that many of these programs still focus on leadership paradigms of the past with only limited appreciation for dramatically different approaches (Conger 1992). But the first step must be to determine what the future demands on leaders will be and then to discover the means to develop these. Given the author’s expertise, we will focus largely on the training side of these competenties in this article, but this is only one of many developmental approaches that must be employed (McCall 1992).
LEADERSHIP
COMPETENCIES
FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
To understand the competencies demanded of twenty-first century leaders, we must start with the business landscape of the future where two primary forces are already altering the nature of organizations as we know them. They are: (1) dramatically heightened competitive pressures, and (2) significant changes in the backgrounds and needs of employees. Since the 1970’s with the rise of Japan and Germany, competitive pressures worldwide have been building like a cyclone. This is most evident in the wide range of products from which consumers can select. A single statistic from the automobile industry illustrates the magnitude of this change. In 1958, U.S. consumers could choose only 21 different models of cars from ten different manufacturers. By 1989, they could choose from 167 models by twenty-five different manufacturers. This is due largely to two interrelated factors: the rise of new world economic powers (e.g., Germany, Japan) and increasing wealth globally for consumers. These factors are fueling an international business war from which there will be no near-term let-up. If anything, with China’s growing wealth and Korea’s push into technological industries, this war will intensity. These global competitive battles are largely responsible for many of the changes that today’s leaders are attempting to manage. For example, fierce competition has meant an ever increasing scramble for markets through innovative company strategies and through higher quality products and services. In addition, competition has brought us the three year idea-to-product life cycle for automobiles and the incredible concerns for cost management and just-in-time inventory. It has pushed companies to search for markets far outside their homelands. Finally, competition (and the advent of computer technology) has forced organizations to flatten their hierarchies and to decentralize decision-making so that they can respond with speed to their rivals’
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actions. These marketplace forces will have significant implications for future leaders. Specifically, to manage effectively in this sea of competition, future leaders at all levels will have to become: 1. Strategic opportunists; 2. Globally aware; and 3. Capable of managing highly decentralized organizations. While we will explore each of these competencies in a moment, suffice it to say for now, today’s approaches to leadership development in these areas are woefully inadequate. For example, the development of strategic competence comes late in the careers of most managers, and then only after years of narrow functional experiences that seriously stunt a true strategic perspective. International experience, until recently, has been a low status opportunity for many fast-track managers taking them away from the networks of the power structure and from visibility for their achievements. On the training side, the average company program has spent little time on strategy skills, little or no time on international issues, and addressed the complexities of decentralized organizations with mostly simple participative decision-making exercises. Preparation then for these key competencies is frightfully poor. In addition to the tidal wave of marketplace pressures, there is another, equally powerful, set of forces coming from within organizations that are shaking up the old competencies of leadership. This set of forces is the by-product of a fundamental shift occurring in the composition of the workforce in the Western World. It is estimated that by the year 2000 fewer than ten percent of North Americans entering the workforce (for their first job) will be white, Anglo-Saxon males. Women and minority groups will comprise the vast majority of future employees (Johnson 1991). They will bring with them a different set of needs and concerns than today’s white males who currently populate the tops of our corporate hierarchies. In addition, a significant percentage of these new employees will be immigrants who have limited education. These individuals will be operating the high-tech factories of the future with a potential outcome of creating a newly emerging caste structure where elites of well educated individuals direct employees who have problems with their English and simple math. But the workforce will not only be more diverse but also one that is less tolerant of the interpersonal weaknesses of their superiors. With the increasing emphasis on organizational behavior in management schools, the appearance of employee rights acts, and a greater public awareness of “effective” interpersonal behavior (due to the popularity of psychotherapy and self-help books), subordinates will expect their leaders to be more interpersonally competent. Those who are not will face a host of barriers to being truly influential as organizational leaders. This shift, however, is only a manifestation of something more profound and
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fundamental-the increasing importance of the workplace as a person’s primary community in life. For example, just a century ago, an individual’s family, their hometown, and their church played vital roles as sources of community and well-being. Today this is no longer the case. Divorce, increased mobility, civic apathy, urban alienation, and disillusionment with organized religion have all contributed to the decline of these communities. Increasingly, individuals will bring the needs originally met by the family, civic, and religious communities to their workplace. The lack of organizational loyalty that we see among employees is in part a reflection of a deeper resentment felt towards companies that poorly address needs for meaning and community. Specifically, these workforce trends will demand that leaders of the future be: 1. Sensitive to issues of diversity; 2. Interpersonally competent; and 3. Community builders. Despite the growing importance of these competencies, the majority of managers are not adequately prepared for them. For example, current training approaches have only recently begun to address their development-especially in terms of the diversity and community-building issues (Conger 1992). Interpersonal skills is the one area where many of today’s programs are strong and have been strong for several decades. But even here questions might be raised about the long-term effectiveness of the current interpersonal skills approaches. For while they have been around for a long time, we might fairly ask whether we see an interpersonally more competent managerial workforce today? Perhaps not-given the history and relative size of the investment in such training. In summary, these are the six competencies that tomorrow’s leaders will require-three are by-products of the marketplace, and three are by-products of a changing workforce. The pressing question, however, is how might we best approach the development of these competencies for tomorrow’s leaders from a training perspective.
THE MARKETPLACE
COMPETENCIES
The Strategic Leader Future leaders will be under enormous pressures to find the strategic opportunities that their competitors have yet to find. This means not only looking more closely at home markets but outside. It also implies searching for internal strategic opportunities to improve quality, service, and prices. Because greater market share and profitability will come only through identifying and meeting customer needs, leaders of the future will have to have a
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keener understanding of their clients. They will have to remain constantly in touch with their markets. Great political and religious leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King succeeded because they identified so closely with the needs of their followers. Business leaders of the future will have to develop a similar mindset. The question that leaders will ask themselves in the 1990’s and beyond will be “How do I get my customers to follow me?” As a result, training will have to put managers far more in touch with their customers by actively involving clients in training programs and sending company managers into learning projects which take them out to experiences in the field dealing directly with clients. But increased customer exposure is not sufficient in itself to develop a true strategic sense. Along with a profound appreciation for long range thinking, rather training must emphasize a breadth of perspective on future markets and competitors alike. For while leaders will continue to be under short-term pressures to innovate, they will simultaneously be under far greater pressure to look long-range. This split will become much more acute than it currently is. Japan, Korea, and Germany are investing significantly for the long-term while the United States and Canada continue to focus on the near term and slash longer term R&D expenditures to cut costs. This lag will show itself in product introductions in the mid to late 1990s where we can expect to see especially dramatic gains by the Japanese and Koreans in new products. Our future leaders will have to resist the short-term by carefully targeting limited resources and by thinking far more strategically for the long-term. This challenge, however, will pose a serious dilemma. Our current crop of future leaders is growing up through a series of jobs which focus on and reward short-range thinking. In addition, our business community still remains concerned about the next quarter’s earnings. These forces will mitigate against the development of a long range, strategic focus. Training must counter these forces by providing “think-tank” opportunities for reflection on long-term strategy. In addition, it must immerse managers in a wealth of information and debate on future demographic, economic and geo-political trends. Finally, job rotation across a range of functions and markets at early stages in a manager’s career will be necessary to overcome this shortsightedness (McCall 1992). The context within which strategy training takes place will also have to change. Currently, most strategy training is now being taught at a some distance from the marketplace-largely through university programs which more often than not employ case studies of strategic issues as the means of instruction. While effective in teaching generic concepts about strategy-making, this approach faces two common dilemmas. The first is that many of the case studies deal with issues in other industries unrelated to the participant’s business. This is the principle reason why we are seeing more and more in-house company programs or university programs customized to a single company. Organizations want classrooms built around their own firm and industry. The second dilemma already alluded to is that case instruction itself remains one step removed from the actual marketplace. There are few reality checks on classroom generated solutions. As a result, a deeper appreciation for strategic
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issues must be complemented through action learning processes which take participants out into the field. It is one thing to decide in a classroom that a company should enter a new market and another to actually attempt to do it. Through a case study, a young manager can have only a limited sense of the complexities and implementation efforts required to think and act strategically. This is most effectively achieved through actual experiences. Action learning (where participants either bring with them or are provided real strategic business problems facing their own companies to analyze and devise action plans) can duplicate in structured learning environments “real-time” experiences by using company strategic issues as the learning context (for example, see Noel & Charan 1988). In addition, action learning provides an educational structure within which a manager can reflect, critique and learn from an undertaking. It frees participants from the pressures of a normal business day where there is little time to integrate learnings and from organizational norms which might otherwise blindside participants’ breadth of learning. Learning by doing in controlled experiences as these will increasingly become the educational wave of the future. The only barrier to their more widespread use will be the cost and the more complex logistics that are involved-two significant hurdles. We will discover, however, one important pitfall to action learning as it becomes more widespread. Since companies are actively involved in the process, they may unconsciously put invisible blinders on their participants through their own world views. For example, instead of challenging current assumptions about a company’s strategy or its marketplace, action learning may continue to reinforce existing assumptions since company projects are selected by the existing management. Just as significantly, participants’ analyses are subjected to critiques by company managers who may only further affirm their organization’s world view (essentially a process of socialization). For this reason, action learning programs of the future will have to involve more outsiders or company mavericks who can effectively challenge company perspectives. We can also expect to see the increased influence of new learning techniques in strategy training. There will be experiments with different mediums to push participants into looking beyond established company world views-to challenge assumptions that led to success in the past but today are perhaps outdated. This will become one of the primary training challenges in the 1990s and beyond-innovative systems and techniques to uncover and challenge organizational world views. One experiment attempting to address this challenge is being conducted at the Center for Creative Leadership in North Carolina where a new program, LeaderLab, uses art and visualization processes to expand participants’ abilities to capture more comprehensively the dilemmas they are facing (Burnside & Guthrie 1991). The objective is to force participants beyond their words and rational minds-on the assumption that we have all too well rehearsed how we explain and solve our current situations. As such, our rationality limits the ability to see options while art and visualization force us out of the mind and
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into considering issues from a new sense of creativity and potential breadth. In the end, experiments such as these may prove to be the next “snake-oil” of training, but at this stage we must encourage the exploration of these new learning processes. Among them, we may find approaches that are truly effective. A final problem to be faced is the tendency to reserve strategy training for senior executive levels. With greater de-centralization, strategy-making in the 1990s will have to be pushed further down the hierarchy. Junior managers must be exposed early on to strategic decision-making experiences. Based on anecdotal evidence from executive education programs at various universities, it appears that the conceptual and strategic skills of young managers are, at best, of uneven quality today. This is due largely to their confinement within narrow functional tracks or stovepipes. As a result, by the time they reach the executive suite they have had few opportunities to develop a strategic competence and perspective. Yet, many are increasingly being called upon to be more strategic in their actions. The Global Leader
While most North American companies compete internationally, many still fail to appreciate the critical nuances of managing and selling abroad (Adler 1991). Naivete remains widespread. Yet given that the growth markets for this decade will be in Asia and perhaps Europe, it is imperative that we move quickly to understand these markets. As professor of management Ian Mitroff (1987) noted, “For all practical purposes, all business today is global. Those individual businesses, firms, industries and whole societies that clearly understand the new rules of doing business in a world economy will prosper; those who do not will perish” (p. ix). And not only will future growth come from these markets but future financing as well. Practically all of the ten largest banks in the world today are Japanese. As a result, your banker today is just as likely to be Japanese as American. In addition, companies will be scouring the globe looking for new knowledge or talent to provide competitive advantage as new products or production innovations will no longer be found just at home but in other countries. Finally, success in tomorrow’s global environment will require highly specialized yet tightly linked teams of global business managers, regional managers, and world-wide functional managers forming what is called the transnational organization (Bartlett & Ghoshal 1989). These networks of managers will be directed by executives who themselves understand the differing demands and skills of each group and can manage their often conflicting concerns. In sum, to manage these transnational organizations and an increasing number of joint ventures with foreigners, the next generation of leaders will have to become very sophisticated. Future leaders at both the mid- and senior management levels will therefore need to possess an understanding of foreign financial markets, of global economics and organizations, and of geo-political forces. Training will have to take managers into the minds of foreign markets
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and political arenas and into the complexities of managing others across a multitude of foreign boundaries and cultures. The first step in developing such unique leadership competencies must come from comprehensive early career-track programs that provide for overseas assignments. As well, training opportunities must be created to implement action learning projects in foreign countries. It will be only through first-hand implementation that managers will learn the many critical nuances of international business. One example of an experiment in this direction is the Global Leadership Program developed by Professor Noel Tichy at the University of Michigan. What makes this program special is that it attempts to teach an understanding of both global and strategic issues through action learning in unique “classrooms”. Participants in teams are taken to Brazil, India, or China (locations vary with programs) where they begin a two-week study mission identifying business opportunities. They experience first-hand what are the dilemmas and opportunities of potential new markets. The Brickler Bulletin describes the experience: “Affected by unanticipated political events, frustrated by bureaucratic red tape, or incapacitated by unfamiliar cuisine, the teams struggled to evaluate the long-term business potential of a foreign market while they were being forced to resolve cultural differences among team members. The teams toured businesses and met with corporate leaders and political oficials, and, in order to better understand the real nature of the host country, they visited typical homes and local market places, traveling by public transportation” CT.Albright 1990).
To insure maximum leverage from these experiences, companies must beforehand target their high growth markets for the future. These must become the regions where international training and work experiences are provided for young managers. Experiences in Kenya will be of limited value if the organization’s future growth is in China. While seemingly obvious, many companies still employ the “State Department” mentality of believing that any form of international experience is useful. Cultures are so specific that companies need to maximize their investment by sending their future leaders to learn in the highest future potential markets. Where logistics are too complex or costs too high for “on location” training, companies may wish to use actors trained in the nuances of other cultures to simulate the dilemmas that a manager must face in managing or negotiating within a particular country. Often just as effectively, classrooms can be composed of participants from many cultures. Simulations and exercises may be designed so that the cultural assumptions and biases of each participant play themselves out in view of others so that participants ultimately become teachers for one another. In addition, structured time for shared reflections on how cultural differences manifest themselves in the classroom interactions will add significant value to these learning experiences.
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The Post-Hierarchical Leader Given the needs for quick responses to markets along with the instantaneous distribution and availability of knowledge thanks to computer technology, our organizations’ hierarchies are collapsing into cross-functional project and process teams. Leaders will have multiple teams reporting to them in addition to their functional subordinates. In the transnational corporations, these teams will span nations as well. This means that the traditional role of the leader as “the boss” will be challenged. The leader will increasingly become a coordinator, coach, and consultant. In addition, a leader’s span of control will expand dramatically. Whereas two decades ago, it was believed that four to five direct reports was ideal, today a span of control involving ten to twelve direct reports is not uncommon. The computer now sitting on a manager’s desk allows him or her to monitor a growing number of individuals with unparalleled efficiency. Further, a greater reliance on outside suppliers, “outside workers” (working at home), and on a growing number of strategic alliances with other companies will demand that leaders possess exceptional networking and coordinating skills. The increasing emphasis on teams and alliances of many forms will encourage leaders to play more supportive than directive roles. This, however, will pose a serious dilemma during critical moments requiring strong directive action. Future leaders may instead find themselves reluctant to provide a strong overarching direction-anxious that such activity might undermine their consultative relationship. This will be reinforced by the growing aversion towards formal authority felt by younger generations (Light 1988; Kiechel 1989). The problem will be compounded when leaders must manage multicultural groups where expectations for leaderhsip may range from consensusbuilding leadership styles to more directive and autocratic styles. So future leaders will be presented with a paradox. For while many employees will want their leaders to be less directive on a day-to-day basis, they will look to their leaders as never before for overall direction and reassurance due to the sea of never-ending changes that their companies must face. As a result, the leader’s overall role as a source of stability and control over the future will remain. The dilemma, as Rosabeth Moss Ranter (19891 has commented, is that the demands on managers and executives will be for them to “become passionately dedicated to ‘visions’ and fanatically committed to carrying them out-but be flexible, responsive, and able to change direction quickly . . .” The outcome will be that leaders must “speak-up, be a leader, set the direction-but be participative, listen well, and cooperate” (pp. 20-21). In terms of training, most of today’s programs are aware of these challenges and dilemmas. They point out the necessity of team work and offer experiential exercises in team building. But these teamwork simulations are generally very simplistic and fail to capture the real-world complexities. Moreover, current programs fall dramatically short on addressing the dilemmas of managing the growing number of outside relationships and alliances (Conger 1992).
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In addition, if the future belongs to the cross-functional or process team, then leaders in the most advantageous positions will be those who are keenly aware of individual functional competencies and know how to manage their vested interests. Simultaneously, they must be able to maintain a broad multifunctional perspective on their product or service processes. Unfortunately, few of today’s training courses are helpful here. While an MBA program can provide some understanding of the needs of the various functions and processes, classroom learning in general has serious limits in this area. A theory or a case study cannot compare to the reality of managing a cross-functional team under tight deadlines and limited resources and against often strongly vested interests. Successful companies can best begin the education process by creating cross-functional work experiences early in a manager’s career (Kotter 1990). Action learning programs which demand significant cross-functional exposure for participants can also be used to reinforce further learning. The increasing decentralization and entrepreneurship that will characterize organizations of the future will likely mean that persuasive communication skills will be the next wave in leadership training. Because of collapsing hierarchies and growing resistance to the power of one’s position or title, formal authority will be less effective in directing and mobilizing staff. A leader’s success will in part be determined by their ability to motivate through words and through the strength of their plans and goals. Leaders will in essence become like “candidates” running for office. Those who can best sell their “platforms” will garner the greatest support and following. This is where traditional skill building classroom approaches may play a role as many communication skills are teachable. The challenge will be to open participants’ capacity for inspirational and rhetorical expressiveness and to develop their abilities at formulating an enticing logic and a rich meaning to their descriptions of company undertakings or projects that they sincerely believe in.
THE WORKFORCE
COMPETENCIES
The Diversity Leader
In addition to the cross-cultural issues of managing overseas operations, tomorrow’s leaders will be managing many different ethnic groups (Morrison 1992). A keener understanding of the issues surrounding diversity and an increasing tolerance of diverse viewpoints will be a critical requirement. Capturing the essential dilemmas posed by this diversity, Burnside and Guthrie (1991) comment that: A crucial issue for leaders today is how to deal effectively with groups that have different values and world views Increasing diversity, however, is not just an ethnic issue. It is a cognitive one as well. It is present in increasing tolerance for diversity of viewpoints. Just a generation ago, employees operated primarily on the expectation that they would do as their organiza-
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tions requested-move when asked, for example. Conformity of views to the organizational line was expected. Now, however, there is a decreasing expectation that employees will conform to organizational norms. Employees feel more freedom to disagree with management and to say no to requests to move if it does not fit their expectations. Thus, we can say that there is a kind of fragmentation of shared views, or norms. It is due in part to work groups being composed of individuals who do not share a common cultural upbringing. . .‘(p. 13).
These forces are similar to those posed by the decentralized organization in that they will increase the tension between employees wishing to be led on the one hand and wishing to lead themselves on the other. The more a leader represents the interests and goals of a single group or faction, the greater the resistance from the other groups will be. So the challenge facing this next generation of leaders will be to create plans and goals that incorporate the needs of diverse groups such that all feel a sense of ownership. Not an easy task. On a more basic level, workforce diversity means that faux pas’ of the past such as the casual sexist remark or the off-the-cuff joke about a particular ethnic group will no longer be acceptable and will raise serious questions about a manager’s credibility. Leaders will be tested in the little actions of day-to-day work to see if they are respectful of the concerns and traditions of a particular gender or ethnic group. Training must therefore incorporate a greater educational content on the issues and concerns of specific ethnic and gender groups. Information on demographic trends, on common dilemmas that a particular group faces in the workplace, on management approaches that engender negative reactions, must all be part of a comprehensive education program. In the optimum case, classroom simulations and exercises should be designed to trigger common diversity issues so that participants can see firsthand the areas or practices where they need to be more sensitive and aware. Field projects where a manager works with an ethnic group with whom he or she has little familiarity can provide an effective context for learning. Moreover, classrooms composed of a diverse mix of participants and trainers themselves are likely to stimulate rich learning experiences if the educational lens of the program is in part focused on these issues. So for example, wherever possible, participants for programs should be selected on the basis of their diversity-their culture, race, gender, faith, and so forth. A good example of unexpected potential educational outcomes is captured by one incident that I myself witnessed. Participants were involved in a program that was divided into two week-long segments-each separated by several months. Just before the second phase of the course, all the men in the group had contacted one another about a golf game on the Saturday before the course began. The women had not been contacted-the men’s shared assumption was that women usually do not play golf. Needless to say, this omission by the men caused significant resentment which surfaced in one session. The class debate that followed was a powerful learning experience about the dilemmas of diversity
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and mistaken assumptions. The male managers left with a profound appreciation of how their assumptions and behaviors had gotten them into a serious dilemma.
The Interpersonal
Leader
Increasingly, we will expect our leaders to be interpersonal role-models. This is particularly evident in the political arena where a candidate’s background and behavior are scrutinized for the slightest flaws. But some of this same attention is now being directed towards our company leaders-especially in terms of interpersonal skills. The popularity of self-help books and psychotherapy has heightened our expectations that our bosses and leaders will be “interpersonally correct.” Depending on the manager and their psychological make-up, interpersonal skill training can be either a straightforward case of step-by-step training or a more complex and diEcult learning process occurring on profound and therapeutic levels. For example, in the case of the former, there are training formats to learn active listening. On the other hand, a manager’s inability to listen may in reality have deep ties to childhood experiences which limit learning from such skills courses. In addition, common problems associated with technique training have been the limited time devoted to acquiring skills in the classroom and then the absence of follow-up coaching. On the same hand, training at the more profound and psychological levels has run into barriers because of concerns surrounding the high professional levels required of trainers and fears of tampering with the human psyche. While both are important concerns, more supportive and constructive environments could be created using highly skilled staff to facilitate deeper learning experiences. Coaching, however, is of paramount importance in this area of competencies, and its absence is a principal reason why interpersonal skills training in general is not as effective as it potentially could be. For no matter whether the training required is straightforward or profound, interpersonal skill development demands active and persistent coaching for new behaviors to take hold. Simply learning a set of techniques fails to recognize that these skills often demand a significant change in behavior that must be continually reinforced. Typically, such needs for coaching fail to be met, and the problem becomes more acute the moment after participants leave the classroom. Equally problematic is the fact that in a typical class of twenty-five, the time for serious coaching on a one-on-one basis is extremely limited. One possible solution to this dilemma is the process advisor system designed by the Center for Creative Leadership. In the ideal case, the process advisor is a psychologist who is versed in organizational issues. Their role as described by the LeaderLab program is “one of coach, advisor, friend, cop, advocate, behavioral scientist. This person must continually prod and encourage the participant to move ahead, to address issues and blocks, to understand how blocks get in the way, and to help in strategizing ways to move them or confront them” (Burnside & Guthrie 1991, p. 36).
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The advisor’s objective is to assist participants during training not only to design effective leadership action plans but to focus on behavioral changes that enhance effectiveness and then to provide follow-up support. This support becomes particularly critical when individuals are making major behavioral changes that are not the easiest nor most comfortable for them. Continual contact is the key to the success of the advisor system. It begins a month or so before the program with an introductory telephone call from the process advisor to assess the participant’s situation. While on the course, there are one-onone sessions with the advisor to craft the participant’s plan of action on their return to the job. During the three month break between the program’s two course sessions, the advisor maintains a monthly telephone link as well as for the two months following the final session. The purpose of the telephone link is to monitor the participant’s progress in addition to trouble-shooting in areas where little progress appears to have been made. To further heighten the effectiveness of these telephone meetings, each participant keeps a daily learning journal-the contents of which are forwarded onto the advisor prior to each telephone contact. This helps the advisor see the daily issues that the participant is facing. In addition, it forces participants to explore in far greater depth their situations -again encouraging greater reflection and learning. During the second session of the course, the process advisor holds a group session with the three participants to whom they have been assigned, and together they serve one another as resources to help identify the leadership improvements that participants wish to make and to identify actions that must be taken to improve. In these sessions, each participant presents an account of their progress-the successes and the barriers. These are evaluated with the process advisor and in the small groups in terms of major learnings to date, and afterwards the learnings are presented to a full class session. Further support and coaching for one’s behavioral change comes also in the form of change partners. There are two forms of these: in-course change partners and back-home change partners. The “in-course” change partners consist of three person teams who work together throughout the program. They are designed as a practice vehicle for involving peers in the participants’ leadership situations. Change partners must learn about each other and learn to work with one another. In many cases, they evolve into a support system for each other during the three month back-home period. The “back-home” change partners are individuals at the worksite whom participants feel can assist them as they try to improve their leadership situation. The program designers note that these back-home partners need to embody three qualities: “encouragement (someone to pat them on the shoulder and egg them on); wisdom (someone who had been through the changes similar to what the participant is attempting and knows their local situation); and truth (someone who will give them honest feedback about the impact of their changes) . . . Since no one person usually can provide all three things needed, the participant works with three or four people, getting at least.one thing from each of them. This is often a difficult task, and is one tool the Process Advisor tries to help the participant get established during the three-month period” (Burnside & Guthrie 1991, pp. 38-39).
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In summary, the change partners in combination with the process advisor provide the important missing link in leadership training-the coach. Before now, coaching might on rare occasion appear in the form of a manager back at the participant’s organization who had attended a similar program and who enjoyed mentoring. But this rarely if ever happens, and the coaching provided by training organizations typically ends the last day of a program. The process advisor idea, however, recognizes that if training is to play a truly deuelopmented role then it must provide coaching mechanisms which extend beyond the course itself-especially when they involve significant behavioral changes. In this case, the training organization assumes that responsibility rather the participant’s organization where much would be left to chance.
The Community
Leader
The last of the leadership competencies required for the future-community building-is along with strategic opportunism one of the absolute most important of the competencies but also one of the most difficult to teach. Community building is a unique talent. It involves two leadership skills that are widely talked about today-empowerment and vision. Both are intertwined since vision itself must be empowering to be truly effective and the nature of the vision’s purpose is not only to achieve a meaningful strategic or company goal but to build a dedicated community (Bennis & Nanus 1985). The important question is whether training can develop such skills. I have seen managers return from programs and more actively reward-which is an element of empowerment. This side of the equation can be taught. Yet an individual’s psychological make-up is the key to success on this dimension. Managers must feel secure in themselves to be truly empowering and to learn how to be empowering. A controlling manager cannot become an empowering manager without significant assistance. A program might cause an occasional break-through with a “disempowering” manager (Conger 19921, but generally speaking, it is highly unrealistic to expect that training will transform such individuals into empowering leaders. The second part of the community-building equation-vision-is far more difficult to train, especially in a one-time program. Vision is the by-product of experience, an openness to ideas and trends, and a sense of personal mission (Bennis & Nanus 1985; Conger 1989; Westley & Mintzberg 1988). What training can do is to create an awareness in managers of the need to seek in their careers the right mix of work experiences and to encourage thinking beyond their status quo. It can also provide participants with information on future demographic and other trends that might stimulate visionary thinking. Personal growth programs may assist a bit if they attempt to help participants find their passions, but this can backfire if discovered passions are unrelated to work or an individual simply has none (Conger 1993). Most importantly, community builders are often individuals who are driven by a deep esprit du corps. They are the ones who in college or on the job seem to pull everyone together for a special project. Their gift is that of the organizer. Most of us do not have this drive. Can you teach it? Probably not, Or at least by
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adulthood the chances are greatly diminished. Finding community builders must come more from selection and encouragement of those who already are.
CONCLUSION:
DEVELOPING
TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY LEADERS
The art of leadership development is still very much in its infancy. We are only just beginning to understand some of the potential tools and experiences that are needed to help managers in more fully realizing their leadership potential. We are also only just beginning to appreciate the care and attention needed to nurture leadership. Up until now, organizations have taken the Darwinian path-the fittest will somehow emerge as leaders. But a great price is paid by this approach-much talent is lost or remains forever under-developed. Just as in the world of impresarios and star athletes, training and development activities are crucial to realizing the potential of future leaders. The following comment by McCall (1993) captures the issues we must face: Not everyone is cut out to be a leader,much less a leader in the turbulent corporate environment of the years ahead. Not everyone is cut out to be a great pianist or an Olympic runner either, but there is a significant lesson in the difference. When great talents are found in these spheres, they are trained and nurtured. To be sure, they enter challenging competitions relative to their current level of development, but each such trial is viewed as a learning event, to be critiqued and learned from. Typical corporate practice stands in start contrast: take promising talent, throw it into tough assignments, stand back, and watch what happens. Survivors, it is assumed, must have “the right stuff” or must have learned by virtue of having the experience. But no great pianist or runner, no matter how naturally gifted, has achieved greatness without years of practice, learning, dedication, and sacrifice (Bloom 1985). Similar hard work is at the core of developing leadership attributes (McCall, Lombardo, & Morrison 1988). It is not survival of the fittest that counts; it is development of the fittest. Organizations, then, face two substantial challenges if they hope to have effective leaders: they must identify those who have the potential to acquire the abilities described earlier, and they must nurture them as tenaciously and carefully as they would nurture any other precious resource critical to success (pp. 274-275). A great challenge awaits us. Both educators and organizations must take increasingly responsibility for growing leading-edge leaders. Educators must themselves learn to be open to new paradigms and to new training approaches. Organizations must move away from seeing leadership training programs as a quick-fix answer to growing leaders. They must also acknowledge and then abandon the sense of greater security they feel with managers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Portions of this article are excerpted from J. A. Conger’s 1993 “The Brave New World of Leadership Training.” In Organizational Dynamics, Winter. New York: American Management Association.
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