In the face of dynamic global trends, organizational success depends heavily on leaders who have the capabilities to navigate through challenges posed by unprecedented forces that operate in the business world. From building a strong pipeline of leaders to preparing present leaders with knowledge and skills that are of the future, organizations are today doing every bit to face future challenges head-on.
In view of this, DDI’s High-Resolution report assesses leadership skills and competencies that are crucial for the leadership for the future. The report investigates its own big data compilation that assesses over 15,000 assessment participants who are set to be considered for leadership roles –from frontline, mid-level, operational, strategic executive, to the C-suite executive, to examine their readiness for high-level roles. The evaluations of the report are based on leadership simulations that involve “day in the life” scenarios, which provide all leaders with identical opportunities to showcase their competencies, and integrates this information along with certain personality and cognitive ability tests.
The dataset for the research comprises of more than 300 organizations and includes more than 20 industries and 18 countries to generate insights that can help organizations predict and proactively shape leader success in the intractable and unpredictable business environment today.
The findings of the research take into account that leadership skills are predictive of profit, revenue and growth especially in the business context within which the leaders operate. These skills are entrepreneurship, business savviness, leading change, driving execution and decision-making. Along with this, another aspect that the report examined was leader readiness when it came to challenges in business contexts. According to the report, leader readiness for the top ten business contexts that organizations encounter were building strategic partnerships and relationships (59 percent), cultivating a customer-focused culture (56 percent), driving efficiency (51 percent), driving process innovation (42 percent), driving profitability (37 percent), driving product innovation (34 percent), creating alignment and accountability (34 percent), enhancing organizational talent (30 percent), building high-performance culture (29 percent) and shaping organizational strategy (27 percent).
The report also examined and specified that personal attributes and personality factors affect leadership and influenced leaders’ success as they take on bigger roles and responsibilities. Personality factors play an important role in how leaders would respond to greater challenges, pressures and visibility, which are a part and parcel of change management and transitions. Therefore, predicting who can navigate through unsettling times entails an evaluation of such traits.
Specifically, in the Indian scenario, the report assessed the readiness of the leaders who operated in dynamic and turbulent business milieu and looked at the collective personality profile of Indian leaders. It found that bold traits were predominant and that Indian leaders were found to be more ambitious, analytically curious, competitive and risk taking than their global peers. Finally, the report concluded on how the background of a leader can drive a more accurate understanding of how skill strengths and deficiencies are arrayed within a leader population.