The Increasing Demands of Executive Management Require New Leadership Competencies

Why The Skills That Got You Here May Not Drive Success in Your New Role

So you've been given the keys to senior management. Congratulations. Now, it's time to prepare for what may become the most rewarding and most challenging journey of your career.

You've earned the right to savor this opportunity because others have seen the application and impact of your management skills, you've earned their trust and confidence, and their recognition of your hard work and special abilities has moved them to test whether you can excel in a broader leadership role.

Now it's your turn to visualize what you're capable of doing, and to make the commitment to acquire new skills, build on your education by elevating your learning and listening skills, and leverage your management experience to deliver results that will affirm the organization's confidence in you.

But now more than ever before, we at Kincannon & Reed believe that your grasp of a new set of leadership competencies is the key to thoughtful, game-changing management. That's because the demands of leadership - and the pressure that comes with it - have never been higher. How else to explain that upwards of 40% of those who assume a new leadership position these days don't last more than 18 months on the job?

The simple truth is that organizations increasingly expect more of their leaders, and the stakes are high for shareholders, employees, and your career. That's true no matter what route your career has taken you on to your new executive-level job. Whether your ascendancy to this top job was something you've aspired to for years, or whether circumstances beyond your control have simply delivered the demands of leadership to your front door, it's important to understand that other people within the organization are watching and waiting to see how you'll lead them.

Whether you're leading a new business unit or an entire organization, your every move is now symbolic; your decisions strategic; and your example paramount in setting a new tone for those who will follow you, and in so doing, challenge themselves much in the same way your new leadership role will put you to the test.

You'll need to bring an open mind and broad, strategic thinking to bear now that you find yourself in a top management role with enterprise-wide responsibilities. And it's important to understand that the skills that got you to this point in your career may not be the same ones that will drive success in your new job.

While much of your professional career to this point has been "individual" in nature, your new leadership position will undoubtedly be broader and more "social," perhaps even more political, and this will require a flexibility and emotional connectivity to the business issues of the day that aren't usually prerequisites for a demanding specialist or individualized role in the organization.

The skills that helped build your career may not be of much help to you now that your new responsibilities demand you broaden your career. But your mastery of skills gained long ago should give you the self-confidence to acquire new, non-specialist skills, so long as you understand that acquiring those new skills and deciding to learn new things every day requires a conscious decision to do just that.

If there's anything that we at Kincannon & Reed have learned from our 25 years of recruiting top talent for business, trade associations, and non-profit organizations in the food, agribusiness, and life sciences arenas, it's that, no matter how they got there, great leaders make a constant, conscious decision to learn what they can from others and adapt to the challenges and opportunities that their work presents them with every day.

To this point, we're reminded of an advertisement we saw recently on a billboard as we hustled from one plane to another at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport: "Success is the sum of the confident decisions you make."

We believe a person's passion will help determine their career path and motivate them to succeed. The members of our Kincannon & Reed team have come to believe that hard work, an open mind, the ability to inspire the best in others, and the commitment to learn from our failings are especially important leadership competencies for the 21^st Century. And we believe the choice and ability to bring these competencies together to make sound business decisions is a hallmark of a great leader.

So how do we identify top leadership talent? While some retired CEOs and academics debate whether great leaders are made or born, we spend every day carefully assessing the organizational needs of our client employers, building a network of world-class talent in food, agribusiness, and life sciences. We're constantly looking for people who have the right combination of experience, education, skills, and the motivation to magnify the impact of their leadership competencies at the senior executive level.

We match up potential leadership candidates against our own experience and perspective as your organization's external leadership consultants, and we believe the leaders of today and tomorrow are already embracing some of these emerging leadership competencies:

Leading with Emotional Intelligence

While a high IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, has long been a prerequisite for top management jobs in food, agribusiness and life sciences, today's broader executive leadership positions require a high degree of Emotional Intelligence, or a realization of how your decisions as a leader will impact other people's behavior, and by extension, the entire organization. Emotionally intelligent leaders aren't threatened by others' leadership competencies. Rather, they understand that success comes from surrounding themselves with smart people and they're comfortable enough to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses. Emotionally intelligent leaders also know they must lead by example, and they have to find ways to motivate, reward, and reinforce organizational behaviors that drive outstanding performance.

Respecting Diversity and Global Perspective in the Workplace

At a time when many organizations' customer bases are becoming more global in scale, their workforces are becoming increasingly diverse. The new face of the organization is actually made up of many faces, requiring (and drawing informed insight and perspective from) a broad range of individuals from diverse backgrounds who bring myriad talents, languages, educations, and cultural and professional experiences to your organization. Our Kincannon & Reed team believes the best leaders are those who understand the value of diversity in the workplace and who have both the sensibility and sensitivity to build globally informed organizations to better serve an increasingly global marketplace.

Knowing that Talent Drives Competitive Advantage

There is an increasing body of knowledge that proves that organizations that put people first finish first. It's no coincidence that the organizations that appeared at or near the top of Fortune Magazine's most recent list of the world's "Most Admired Companies" scored exceptionally high on both its "People Management" and "Quality of Management" indices. Our 25 years of experience tells us that human capital drives competitive advantage. We're convinced, and we hope you'll appreciate, that organizations that do the best job attracting, developing, and retaining world-class executive talent will be the ones that drive the best results for shareholders and employees far into the future.

Until next time...

Kincannon & Reed
June 2006