Developing tomorrow's top leaders isn't just one person's responsibility, and it certainly isn't the sole responsibility of the human resources department. It's fascinating to ask incumbent leaders: "How much time have you devoted to building future leaders?" The answers vary greatly.
Equally revealing are the responses when you ask those marked to rise to top executive positions, "How much have you done to develop yourself?" Again, the answers may surprise you.
With the imminent changes in the economic and leadership landscape, it's obvious that ensuring adequate leadership for the future requires everyone do their part. The fact is that effective leadership is perhaps the major driver of organisational success, and ineffective leadership is definitely the major driver of organisational failure. I've worked with Thailand's business leaders for two decades and this has been the case time and time again. Thai organisations seeking sustainable success and progress must pay attention to meeting these imminent leadership needs and plan for the next 10 years.
Why must leadership change? Cast your mind back 10 years: could you have imagined a decade ago the changes in how leaders are expected to lead and the effects of rapidly emerging technology? For example, Facebook and other social media, both public and organisational, have forever changed my life and the way I need to communicate and work with my people; this is what my people demand and expect and there is no going back to the old ways as a "leadership dinosaur".
Who knows what will emerge in the next five to 10 years? Consider the rapidly approaching Asean Economic Community (AEC) which will transform Southeast Asia's workforce and marketplace like never before. I ask myself "Will today's version of leadership meet the challenges leaders face tomorrow?"
Take a moment to reflect on what that may mean for yourself and your organisation? What are the implications for leaders at all levels? One thing we can guarantee is the world will get more complicated, not less, and the job of leaders more complicated with it. Whatever created success today may have to be left behind or it may have to be taken into the future with us, but for sure there will be new elements that we will have to create or add into leadership DNA.
This requires us to consider what constitutes leadership today; what are the knowledge areas, applicable skills and personal attributes that bring us success here and now? Have these always been the same throughout your career? Did you leverage all the same knowledge, skills and attributes 10 or five years ago that you need today? Has the position changed? The people changed? The world changed? I think it's safe to assume they will change again and so will leadership requirements.
However, as the rate of change increases, for tomorrow's leaders we have to act now; we really must take care of high performers and talents so they are here when we need them and have been developed sufficiently to really contribute; unless no matter the success of today will transform into a legacy of failure tomorrow. Most leaders spend too little time thinking about the skills, knowledge and attributes that really create success or indeed how relevant will changing skills in the future needs to be.
Getting started with this requires consideration of the fundamentals; the required skills we know that we can't discard. Many people basically think that several skills can be developed in a training session. Attending the session to listen and discuss the skill requirement in each area is totally different from seeing the possibility to make use of it.
Leadership, however, cannot be learned, it has to be developed and groomed; and development comes through doing and reflecting, not training. The organisation should then consider what kind of leaders are needed to overcome the challenges of the new business landscape and build them with a focus on finding the 'right' leadership cadre to lead the organisation for the next eight or 10 years.
Another important consideration in building the foundation is the fact that people are changing; for example the demand for work and life balance. The workforce that would stay late and forever will, to all intents and purposes be gone in the next decade. Offering this is not an option, it's an essential. Leadership talent has other places to be. Today's leaders need to know how to build the new reality.
Overall, the ultimate success or failure of organisations is largely driven by how well they have been executing their strategies and the ability to weather and thrive in change. Leaders to a large extent face the same demands and must stay competitive by changing the rules of operation as well as the way they lead.
ArinyaTalerngsri is managing director of the APM Group, Thailand's leading organisation and people development consultancy. Write her at arinyt@apm.co.th