Tomorrow’s CEO. New Demands. New Needs.

Ana Dutra, Chief Executive Officer, Korn/Ferry Leadership and Talent Consulting & Executive Vice President Korn/Ferry International.

“We live in A VUCA world.” Echoing Bernard Zen-Ruffinen, Ana reiterated the challenges of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA) on talent and leadership – and how effective and sustainable talent strategies must start with the CEO.

She said, “Talent is a senior leadership issue.  It’s for us to champion as well as model. 

Solid talent management starts at the top of the house.”

While often companies are cognizant of this need, they seem continuously challenged to produce better leaders.

Why do leaders who have been successful, sometimes spectacularly successful over long periods of time, fail—seemingly overnight?

Ana outlined the Six Qs of Leadership – six major building blocks to long-lasting success in managers and executives.  And, some have more impact than others:

• IQ – Intelligence Quotient – how bright you are.
• TQ – Technical/Operational Quotient – how able you are to get things done.
• MQ – Motivational Quotient – how driven you are to achieve and grow.
• XQ – eXperience Quotient – how many of the requisite kinds of experiences you have had.
• EQ – Emotional Quotient – how well you handle yourself and work with others (sometimes referred to as EI, or emotional intelligence for Goleman followers).
• LQ – Learning Agility Quotient – how deftly you adopt new skills, behaviors and beliefs.

So… is there a special “Q” for CEO and senior leadership? Or, is there a ‘must have’ Q for CEOs and senior executives? Ana noted specifically that EQ and LQ become the missing links for executives and get in the way of real, long term success. They’re stuck – and everybody around them is then stuck.

Can Q Change?

So, first, we need to educate managers and executives about the existence, and contributions of all 6 quotients but ensure they understand IQ, TQ, MQ and XQ are not the distinguishing characteristics but rather price of admission to any leadership role. Then, focus on developing EQ and LQ with differentiated leadership development initiatives as building blocks for long-lasting success.

The changing paradigm - especially within European Leadership – also tells us new competencies are required to lead and to manage talent in a VUCA world.  These are not ‘soft’ skills’ but rather focus on being connected. In doing so, perhaps we will move the needle on some alarming statistics. 

• In the last decade, one-third of Fortune 500 CEOs lasted fewer than three years.
• Failure rates among top executives range from 30 to 75 percent.
• Over half of first-time general managers stumble, some never to recover.

Success does indeed start at the top. Our audience strongly agrees.

LM