A leadership crisis exists in today's management as corporate leaders nowadays still have an industrial age mindset, treating people as employees, assets and capital, which has to be changed into a completely different paradigm, according to Ameer Ahamed, CEO, Franklin Covey Sri Lanka and Maldives.
Ameer Ahamed |
Addressing members of the Sunday Times Business Club (STBC) at the Taj Samudra, recently, he said FranklinCovey is a worldwide organization that deals with great leaders, great teams, great results programmes to help leaders learn how to build trust and influence with others; define their team's purpose and their job to be done, and create a strategic link between the work of the team and the goals of the organization.
Quoting Stephen Covey he said, "The need of a new era is greatness tapping into the reaches of human genius and motivation requires leaders to have a new mindset, new skill-set, and new tool-set."
He said today's leaders must be able to see their people - the team as "Whole People" - body, heart, mind, spirit and manage and lead them accordingly. As a result, leaders spend their efforts creating a place where people want to stay and in which they are enabled to offer their best, time and time again.
Referring to what he calls a ‘leadership crisis today’, Mr Ahamed said the transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Worker Age has resulted in four chronic problems faced by today's leaders with the first one being not being able to trust whuch results in wary customers, hesitant partners, a cynical public and suspicious employees.
The second crisis he said is: strategic uncertainty challenges that once took years to materialize, now arise overnight. Competitive advantage, vying for capital and talent; and hyper-paced technological change means that someone on the other side of theworld just turned one's business on its head.
The third he said is a shortage of experienced leadership. In some countries many leaders are retiring and other rapidly growing countries lack qualified leaders resulting in inconsistent execution of weak decisions, missed opportunities and unfulfilled employees.
The fourth is the war for talents. Just when the right idea can change an industry, knowledge and creativity are at a premium and totally mobile. People no longer are satisfied with just showing up; they want to make a difference. The best people hire their employers, not the other way around and the contribution they can make is more motivating than their pay-cheque. All of these could be summed up in clarifying purpose, unleash talent, align systems resulting in inspiring trust.
Great leaders can be defined as having four imperatives. They -- inspire trust to build credibility as a leader so that people will trust the leader with their highest efforts; clarify purpose to define a clear and compelling purpose that people will want to offer their best to achieve; align systems to create system of success that support the purpose and goals of the organization, enable people to do their best work, operate independently of the leader and endure overtime and unleash talent to develop a winning team where people's unique talents are leveraged against clear performance expectations in a way that encourages responsibility and growth.
The club is hosted by the Taj Samudra Hotel and co-sponsored by Hameedia. |
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