Matt Paese, SVP of leadership insights at DDI, shares research-backed insights on where leaders encounter obstacles, their biggest concerns and frustrations, and what they value most in their roles.
Today’s business leaders face unprecedented challenges that can lead to stress and burnout. It’s no small feat to ensure teams can perform well in uncertain environments, and leaders often lack the time to learn new skills and gain insights. This has created a demand for efficient, personalized learning that fits into their daily work, allowing them to improve without disruption.
In the following interview, Matt Paese, senior vice president of leadership insights at DDI, shares his thoughts and insights on leaders’ biggest obstacles, concerns and frustrations and what they value most in their roles. Backed by extensive DDI research, Paese sheds light on the critical skills leaders need to navigate uncertain times and highlights how organizations can support effective leader development.
CLO: What are the key challenges, priorities and needs of today’s leaders?
Paese: Leaders in today’s environment face new, unfamiliar challenges so regularly that stress and burnout are common. They are tasked with ensuring strong team performance in highly ambiguous situations. Shifts in the competitive landscape, disruptive new technologies, organizational restructuring and the need for rapid upskilling to match the pace of change are just a few among many forces that create new, unfamiliar challenges for leaders. The velocity and chaos of business means that leaders can waste no time, and this extends to how they learn.
We find that leaders do want to learn. In fact, they crave time with others to do so, but they need to be able to gain and use personalized insights efficiently, to support learning that is relevant to their daily work. Leaders also need to learn in the flow of work, with real-time skill application, immediate feedback and continuous improvement in the context of actual work challenges.
What skills do leaders need to navigate current and future uncertainties?
In DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2023, leaders identified five key skills as crucial in today’s business environment: developing talent, strategic thinking, managing change, prioritization and influencing others.
While leaders want support to develop these skills, many organizations fail to provide learning and development opportunities to truly build new skills and change behavior.
Are companies prioritizing these crucial leadership skills, and how do successful organizations approach development?
While more than 60 percent of leaders say the five skills listed above are critical, only 30 percent or less have ever received training to develop them. Many companies see leadership skills as “soft” and then make the mistake of deprioritizing leadership development in favor of technical or functional training — or no training at all. Some organizations, however, are leveraging learning content, technology and insights from assessment, which allows them to provide more personalized learning in the moments when individuals or groups need it most.
The most successful organizations are able to customize and deploy a wide array of content programmatically, addressing company-wide priorities and just-in-time needs, making development part of daily work.
What are the most effective and well-received development approaches?
It’s a mistake to believe that the stress and demands of work make leaders averse to learning and development. Our research suggests a different conclusion.
In addition to personalization and in-the-moment access to learning, leaders crave connections and are drawn to the human experience of learning. The most sought-after development experiences among leaders are instructor-led training in a classroom of peers and professional coaching.
Hybrid and remote workplaces continue to leave leaders feeling starved for more time with their teams and colleagues, both in the way they work and in the way they learn.
How does diversity and inclusion shape leadership development strategies of modern organizations?
Today, only 21 percent of leaders say their company recruits and promotes from diverse candidate pools. Meanwhile, only 23 percent of high-potential pool members at top-performing companies are women, and since 2020, the number of organizations with no DEI program has increased from 15 percent to 20 percent, according to DDI’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Report 2023.
These trends and others persist despite the compelling evidence that organizations with stronger DEI efforts far outperform their competition. Awareness of the importance of diversity and inclusion, as well as the skills to foster an environment that capitalizes on human uniqueness, is crucial to both culture and the bottom line, making these critical topics for every organization.
How are emerging technologies, such as AI, influencing the landscape of leadership development?
One of the most exciting developments is how AI-driven assessment is enabling learners to practice skills with an AI partner and receive immediate, accurate, nuanced evaluation and feedback. Complex skills like coaching, influencing and providing feedback can be practiced safely and comfortably at the leader’s pace, without any involvement of human assessors or trainers. These assessments are proving to be as or more reliable and accurate than human assessors and are creating an exciting new horizon in which people can receive accurate feedback about their skills in safe, efficient ways that foster greater use and faster growth.
How should businesses measure the impact and effectiveness of leadership development?
At the individual leader level, learning should result in two core outcomes: application and growth. Application is the use of new learning in actual work situations, and growth is the demonstration of behavior change over time. Both metrics should be part of an organization’s development strategy.
At the organizational level, you can gauge leadership development effectiveness through improvements in key performance indicators, including enhanced employee engagement scores, reduced turnover rates, increased productivity metrics and higher customer satisfaction ratings. Operational efficiencies such as decreased downtime, shorter production times and improved safety records can reflect the positive impact of leadership development initiatives on your bottom line.
Explore more findings from DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2023, one of the largest leadership research projects in the world. Since 1999, DDI has examined the state and business impact of leadership development practices and leader experiences within and across organizations in major industries and economies around the globe.
