Viewed in Harvard Business Review
Change is hard, but it’s essential in order to become a great leader. Learn how you can use practical advice and tips on your journey toward becoming an empowering leader.
The authors Herminia Ibarra, Claudius A. Hildebrand, and Sabine Vinck from Spencer & Stuart discuss the changing expectations of executives in the corporate world.
Empowering and enabling
While producing results has always been a requirement for executives, the approach to producing those results has shifted from a centralized, top-down decision-making style to a decentralized approach that empowers and enables employees.
This shift has made people skills, or “soft skills,” especially critical for leaders. However, many executives struggle to adapt to this new reality as the term “people skills” refers to a wide range of competencies, leaving some confused about what they entail.
Listening and collaborating
Effective leaders need to work effectively with people in small groups, across networks, and across the organization, and require a different set of skills for each situation, including asking good questions, listening, empathizing, and empowering, collaborating and influencing, and culture-shaping and aligning.
A journey
The Spencer Stuart study examined 75 CEO successions at large-cap companies in the United States and Europe from 2009 to 2019 and found that people skills were critical for successful leadership.
The study found that there is no one way to acquire these skills, but rather, the journey involves three stages:
The departure, the voyage, and the return
The departure stage involves recognizing the need for change and leaving behind familiar ways of working.
The voyage involves encountering obstacles and trials that teach important lessons.
The return involves arriving at a new understanding of who the leader is and what kind of leader they want to be and transferring what they’ve learned to others.
