Webinar: the Continuing Leadership Crisis

Author: Dave Crisp

7 Apr

Colleagues at the Human Capital Institute asked if I would present a webinar with them on whether the ‘leadership crisis is over’ or not. Yes, I would; no it’s not! Not by a long shot. here’s the write up:

Next Human Capital Institute Webcast on Talent Acquisition –
Title:   Is the Leadership Hiring Problem Over?
When:    Tuesday, Apr 21 2009 / 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET
Presented By:    Dave Crisp , CEO , Crisp Strategies
Fee: Free – on a first come, first serve basis
While the economy may have extended the projected leadership gap for a short time as many Boomers un-retire, employers will still face labor shortages in many areas of their companies, most notably among their executive team. Why? Generation X, those employees with the next amount of experience on the job, are a smaller population and just don’t have enough people to fill the seats being vacated by Boomers.
So how should an organization prepare itself for this gap? The strategies include operating leaner organizations with less management, dramatically improving Boomer hiring techniques and vigorous leadership development practices to "grow" younger workers. Discovering which approach- or developing a new one- will be the focus of this webcast.

So, for anyone interested in HR and Talent Management, registration is here.

The genesis of this, of course, is the many knee-jerk reactions some observers inevitably have to any crisis. For some current job losses seem to mean it’s a buyers market, the hiring crunch is over. With so many out of work, they reason, companies can hire whomever they need, maybe even at bargain basement prices. The fact is it’s harder than ever to get leaders who can help bail us out of this mess.

We need more leaders, not only due to retirements (and, yes, some of those are being postponed, but only temporarily), but also because flatter, widely dispersed organizations and the need for more innovation require more people with leadership skills than ever before. People are available, but the right skills aren’t.

This is one of many assumptions people leap to in times of distress. We’ve commented on some others – like believing that now we need financial wizards to save us. They got us into the mess, don’t forget, so why would we think they’ll fix it?

Another mistake is thinking ‘in tough times we need tough leaders.’ This one isn’t entirely wrong, just dangerously misinterpreted by many. The problem is in the word tough. We’re right enough to say ‘when the going gets tough, the tough get going,’ but tough has many meanings. Look at Hitler versus Churchill. Both tough. Hitler was admired by many before the War. in the US, in England, sadly in Germany. very widely because he took tough steps to bail his country out of the Depression. Observers failed to pay much attention to his methods, however. When the inevitable resulted, we needed a different type of toughness to overcome this earlier mistake.

Good people can be tough, too, but in today’s crisis there is a tendency once again to look at the wrong kind of ‘tough guys’ who undertake dramatic layoffs and cut programs, who ‘make the tough decisions.’ Well, let’s not forget that sometimes the tough decisions are to support your people when it costs something to do it. What makes leadership a challenge is that you have to constantly weigh difficult choices and try to make the best ones, not necessarily popular with your audience and not necessarily just penalizing the less powerful players.

What appears ‘tough’ to one, may in fact be the easy choice, what everyone else is doing. Leadership is taking all the factors into account, including how short term this recession might be in retrospect, and choosing the higher path, not just the expedient one. A number of CEOs have made the effort to save cost without layoffs, choosing instead to offer leaves, unpaid vacation extensions, time-sharing of reduced hours, re-assignment to training or neglected maintenance tasks and so forth, to name only a few options.

We have to hope that facing a crisis is always taken as a chance for everyone to learn greater leadership skills by pitching in to save each other. People rise to the occasion and come up with creative solutions if they are supported and encouraged. Those who unnecessarily lay off instead will be the losers in the long run as they discover the leadership hiring crisis is far from over!

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