Leadership success linked to eating chocolate?

If only it were so ...

Sadly, for many chocolate lovers, our Research Lab has yet to prove a link between chocolate and leadership success, but we thought it would be fun to dream on April Fool's Day.

The good news is that there is lots of good research (much of it conducted by CHPD) about improving leadership performance, including the leadership behaviours needed to survive in today's complex and dynamic business environment.

Commentators have described this post-recession world as the ‘new normal’. The environment we operate in is no longer stable. The new normal is characterised by even greater complexity, running at a higher intensity and speed, with a higher likelihood of volatile events occurring and affecting our business operations on a regular basis.

In this environment, our leaders face a number of paradoxes and can be paralysed in their decision making as they discuss and debate the right thing to do. Leaders need to be able to understand the changing competitive landscape and respond with new and focused strategies. Success will come from tackling the short term needs while engaging in long term thinking.

A recent McKinsey Quarterly article confirmed these new requirements of our leaders, claiming that it is all about … “striking the right balance between thorough, unbiased decision-making processes, on the one hand, and timely action, on the other. While there’s no silver bullet, taking concrete steps to cultivate internal critics, safeguard diversity of thought, clarify assumptions underlying different points of view, and force tough choices between business priorities can help.”In this environment, CHPD has identified three crucial leadership behaviours which can drive success:

• Conceptual flexibility – the ability to see issues from many different perspectives and compare the pros and cons of at least two feasible options prior to implementation. This behaviour is essential in understanding paradoxes and better strategic decision making. It is also crucial in innovation, something that is essential if organisations are to survive and thrive in today’s highly competitive landscape.

• Teamwork – creating and developing cohesive teams within your unit and across related departments, functions or sectors. Better and faster strategy development can come from a combination of conceptual flexibility and teamwork. Kleiner Perkins’ Randy Komisar in a recent McKinsey interview said: “There’s a methodology I’ve used within companies for making big, hard decisions … It starts with assembling a group that is very diverse. If you look at my partners, you’d see an unruly gang of talented people with very different experiences, very different domain skills, and, consequently, very different opinions.” Great leaders are able to take advantage of really diverse teams and diverse opinions to form successful strategies.

• Empathy - finding out and encouraging others to express openly their real thoughts and feelings. If teamwork and conceptual flexibility are to be effective, then the behaviour of empathy is crucial. It enables leaders to truly seek to understand the ideas of others without ignoring or interrupting them.

It's worth checking to see if your leaders have strengths in these three behaviours, because CHPD’s assessment of thousands of leaders reveals that many consistently fall below the benchmark level required for high performing organisations.

To find out how you can assess and develop these much needed leadership behaviours, email info@chpd.com or call +44 (0)20 7940 5120.