Leadership in times of uncertainty

Dec 20th

This paper is sparked by a dinner discussion, facilitated by Stanton Marris and hosted by Addleshaw Goddard in November 2010 with participants from a number of financial service businesses with the theme Have our leaders led us down the garden path and how do we get back up again?

A recent paper by Douglas Board † suggested that there had been a deafening silence about the role of leadership up to and during the crisis in financial institutions.  We wanted to test if a focus on leadership and leadership development had become irrelevant and we wanted to find out if leadership and leadership development had any answers to offer. 

To see if leadership had fallen off the radar we undertook a quick and simple survey of a number of financial services contacts.  The summary results are appended.  The headlines though were that over the last 3 years approaches to leadership development have changed, becoming more focused, formal and systematic, and investment in building leadership capability has increased as it is seen as more important than ever.  Respondents said that the priorities and challenges for leadership capability were: combining global and strategic leadership with operational leadership skills; talent and succession; change skills.

Click here to read the full report ‘Leadership in times of uncertainty’ including the survey responses

This article is filed under: leadership, leadership development, transformational leadership