Duke Executive Leadership Survey – Leadership Counts March 25th, 2009

Heather McCulligh

In recent months, this blog has included a lot on the need for talent management and leadership in the current economic downturn, so when I saw an article on Workforce on the Duke Executive Leadership Survey it immediately caught my attention.

Here’s a quick rundown on what this survey is all about:

In the fall of 2008, the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business conducted The Duke Executive Leadership Survey. The survey of 205 executives covered a number of leadership issues. The leadership skills identified by executives as being most important included:

• Promoting an ethical environment
• Acting with authenticity
• Accurately interpreting the competitive environment
• Developing trust

Some of the study findings were particularly compelling. Notably, how leaders who are “more competent and more trustworthy are perceived as offering a more compelling and more valid inspirational impetus for followers.” Also, the research shows that this type of leader tends to have employees who “pursue more challenging goals, which in turn leads to greater organizational success.”

All of this to say that leadership does really matter to an organization’s ongoing success – now, more than ever. Employees who are engaged and inspired perform better, and are focused on achieving business goals. Regardless of your current talent management strategy, focusing on having this type of leadership can make a critical difference.

The idea of inspirational leadership resulting in stronger employee performance is not a new one, but it is one worth keeping at the forefront. Too often, it’s easy to get stuck on a single piece of the talent management puzzle, whether it is technology, succession planning, leadership development or something else entirely. The bottom line is that all of these elements cannot exist in isolation from one another.

Talent management is complicated at best, but maybe current economic conditions provide us all with the perfect time to regroup and retool so we are creating leaders that have the skills outlined above, and our organizations are ready for the future.

Tags: coaching, leadership, managing in a downturn, performance management