Leadership Today

The failings of leadership have been cited as a cause of the global financial crisis. Perhaps this can be said of any significant crisis. So what does it take to be a successful leader in today's economy? Below is what industry leaders identify as the six essential characteristics of today's rising leaders.

What seems to be missing from this list below, obtained from industry leaders themselves, is ethics and morals. I think that is the biggest contributing factor to the various economic, political, social and environmental problems we face.

Their list:

1. Ambitious. Emerging executives are highly ambitious, but retain a balance between their ambition and arrogance. They are comfortable with their assessment of a situation.

2. Decisive. They aren't afraid of making decisions at an operational, tactical and strategic level. They don't hesitate to take action and responsibility for driving change, and can handle lots of information from a variety of perspectives to make effective, strong decisions.

3. Brave. They should be able to walk into a boardroom and hold their own. They need to be flexible, knowledgeable and have impact. A good emerging leader remains clam, in control, garnering respect by they way they hold themselves and delivering messages with confidence.

4. Empowering. They have the ability to empower other people in an organisation. They are happy to push decision-making downwards and don't need to hold onto a lot of the nitty-gritty work. They promote other people's ownership while still providing guidance and support to their team.

5. Entrepreneurial. They tend to be entrepreneurial, looking outside to see what's going on in the marketplace. They seek out innovative solutions to problems, challenge set paradigms, and reject the status quo. They focus on external drivers rather than just internal ones.

6. Visionary. They are able to set strategic direction, seeing where a business is heading and understanding the short- and long-term issues. They tend to be quite innovative, stepping outside the box and are able to put guidelines in place to set the pace of change and make things happen.

[Source: Human Resources Leader, 15 September 2009]