The Future Leader

22How Well Are We Practicing These Skills Today?

The coach, the translator, the futurist, the technology teenager, and Yoda: these are the most crucial skills that leaders of the future must possess in order to be successful over the next decade and beyond. In conjunction with the mindsets discussed earlier, mastering these skills will make you an unstoppable and invaluable leadership force. However, you must remember that your responsibility is to also make sure that those around you master these skills as well.

Let's take a global look at how we are practicing these skills. These numbers are quite consistent with what we saw earlier in the mindsets section. Collectively, respondents believe they are doing a pretty good job of practicing these skills, with the numbers dropping considerably when asked about their managers and senior executives: 57% of all managers and 58% of all senior executives fall into the bottom two categories, respectively. Only 8% of all managers and senior executives were said to be practicing the skills outlined in this book “very well.” (See Figure 22.1.)

From this high-level vantage point, we can now break things down by individual contributors (ICs), managers, and senior executives to see where the gaps are and how big those gaps are. ICs put 60% of their managers and 62% of their senior executives in the bottom two categories of “somewhat well” and “not well at all.” Managers also put 60% of their senior executives in the bottom two categories. ...