Gartner survey shows only half of business leaders feel confident leading their teams
Announcement posted by Gartner 24 Jul 2019
To boost organisation performance, HR leaders must develop “complementary leadership”
Only 50% of employees agree that their team leader effectively creates a vision for the future of the team, according to a global survey of 4,000 employees by Gartner, Inc. More troubling — leaders are having a crisis of confidence in themselves with only half of more than 2,800 surveyed reporting they are well-equipped to lead their organisation in the future.
“Leaders today have more responsibilities than ever, but are ill-equipped to take on their expanded roles,” said Sari Wilde, managing vice president in the Gartner HR practice. “We are seeing organisations overhaul their leadership models, hoping the right combination of competencies will enable leaders to tackle their growing responsibilities. Unfortunately, relying on leadership models alone isn’t enough.”
Gartner’s research reveals that rather than focusing on leadership models, HR leaders should create an environment built on “complementary leadership” – the intentional partnership between one leader and one or many leader partners to share leadership responsibilities based on complementary skillsets. In fact, complementary leadership can provide a big boost to leaders’ performance. Gartner analysis showed leaders who use complementary leadership saw a 60% increase in their teams’ performance and a 40% increase in their own performance.
“Our research found that leaders are not always best-positioned to manage every responsibility they are tasked with; instead, the best leaders identify others who have a stronger grasp of skills at which they are weak and share responsibilities with them,” said Ms. Wilde.
To enable complementary leadership, HR leaders should focus on the following questions:
Equip leaders to identify their locally relevant gaps, not universal needs
Leaders need to know their current level of skills proficiency so they can prioritise what they need to develop and where they need help. Today’s leadership assessments can be misleading because they don’t include the right inputs and prioritise results based on the wrong metrics. Rather than evaluating leaders against organisation-wide metrics that are too broad, leaders should focus on identifying locally relevant development priorities.
“To do this, leaders should focus on sourcing development priorities from their teams, which will enable employees and leaders to coalesce around a shared set of priorities in service of the team,” Ms. Wilde said. “Additionally, specific context must be factored into assessments of capability needs and performance potential. This enables a better understanding of how leaders are positioned to perform within the specific challenges and needs of their business unit and/or function.”
Develop leaders for practical application, not personal transformation
Many leadership development programs last only a few days and aim to completely transform leaders’ approach to their role. Often, leaders struggle to apply a drastic transformation once they return to their desks. A better approach centres around integrating leaders’ workflows and priorities into development programs to enable leaders to apply their learning in context. HR should start by determining two things:
Aligning development programs with leaders’ day-to-day reality helps leaders understand how they can use new skills in their current role.
Create leader partnerships, not just better individual leaders
HR leaders can serve as the catalyst to help leaders identify and make the most of partnerships. Rather than waiting for individual leaders to develop all of the necessary skills, HR must help them find the right partners to share their responsibilities, particularly in the face of filling urgent skill needs. These leader partnerships allow each leader to specialise in core skills, develop needed skills and lead in critical areas. This type of partnering can increase leaders’ skill preparedness by 54%.
Additional information is available in the Gartner report, “Reshaping Leadership for the Future.” The report explains how organisations are tackling leadership challenges to generate better performance.
About Gartner ReimagineHR
Gartner experts will provide additional insight into the labour and talent issues at the Gartner ReimagineHR Conference, taking place October 28-30 in Florida. Gartner ReimagineHR is the premier event for HR leaders around the world. Join Gartner and senior HR executives to hear key insights and learn actionable strategies necessary to support organisational performance. Gartner ReimagineHR will also be held August 6-7 in Sydney, and September 18-19 in London. Follow news and updates from these events on Twitter using #GartnerHR.
About Gartner for HR Leaders
Gartner for HR Leaders brings together the best, relevant content approaches across Gartner to offer individual decision makers strategic business advice on the mission-critical priorities that cut across the HR function. Additional information is available at http://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/human-resources-leaders.
About Gartner
Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500. We equip business leaders with indispensable insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities and build the successful organisations of tomorrow.
Our unmatched combination of expert-led, practitioner-sourced and data-driven research steers clients toward the right decisions on the issues that matter most. We are a trusted advisor and objective resource for more than 15,000 organisations in more than 100 countries — across all major functions, in every industry and enterprise size.
To learn more about how we help decision makers fuel the future of business, visit www.gartner.com.
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“Leaders today have more responsibilities than ever, but are ill-equipped to take on their expanded roles,” said Sari Wilde, managing vice president in the Gartner HR practice. “We are seeing organisations overhaul their leadership models, hoping the right combination of competencies will enable leaders to tackle their growing responsibilities. Unfortunately, relying on leadership models alone isn’t enough.”
Gartner’s research reveals that rather than focusing on leadership models, HR leaders should create an environment built on “complementary leadership” – the intentional partnership between one leader and one or many leader partners to share leadership responsibilities based on complementary skillsets. In fact, complementary leadership can provide a big boost to leaders’ performance. Gartner analysis showed leaders who use complementary leadership saw a 60% increase in their teams’ performance and a 40% increase in their own performance.
“Our research found that leaders are not always best-positioned to manage every responsibility they are tasked with; instead, the best leaders identify others who have a stronger grasp of skills at which they are weak and share responsibilities with them,” said Ms. Wilde.
To enable complementary leadership, HR leaders should focus on the following questions:
- How do we help leaders focus on the right capabilities?
- How do we get leaders to change their behaviours?
- How do we fill leaders’ urgent capability gaps quickly?
Equip leaders to identify their locally relevant gaps, not universal needs
Leaders need to know their current level of skills proficiency so they can prioritise what they need to develop and where they need help. Today’s leadership assessments can be misleading because they don’t include the right inputs and prioritise results based on the wrong metrics. Rather than evaluating leaders against organisation-wide metrics that are too broad, leaders should focus on identifying locally relevant development priorities.
“To do this, leaders should focus on sourcing development priorities from their teams, which will enable employees and leaders to coalesce around a shared set of priorities in service of the team,” Ms. Wilde said. “Additionally, specific context must be factored into assessments of capability needs and performance potential. This enables a better understanding of how leaders are positioned to perform within the specific challenges and needs of their business unit and/or function.”
Develop leaders for practical application, not personal transformation
Many leadership development programs last only a few days and aim to completely transform leaders’ approach to their role. Often, leaders struggle to apply a drastic transformation once they return to their desks. A better approach centres around integrating leaders’ workflows and priorities into development programs to enable leaders to apply their learning in context. HR should start by determining two things:
- What work processes and frameworks are leaders comfortable with?
- How can HR leaders adapt these processes to develop leaders?
Aligning development programs with leaders’ day-to-day reality helps leaders understand how they can use new skills in their current role.
Create leader partnerships, not just better individual leaders
HR leaders can serve as the catalyst to help leaders identify and make the most of partnerships. Rather than waiting for individual leaders to develop all of the necessary skills, HR must help them find the right partners to share their responsibilities, particularly in the face of filling urgent skill needs. These leader partnerships allow each leader to specialise in core skills, develop needed skills and lead in critical areas. This type of partnering can increase leaders’ skill preparedness by 54%.
Additional information is available in the Gartner report, “Reshaping Leadership for the Future.” The report explains how organisations are tackling leadership challenges to generate better performance.
About Gartner ReimagineHR
Gartner experts will provide additional insight into the labour and talent issues at the Gartner ReimagineHR Conference, taking place October 28-30 in Florida. Gartner ReimagineHR is the premier event for HR leaders around the world. Join Gartner and senior HR executives to hear key insights and learn actionable strategies necessary to support organisational performance. Gartner ReimagineHR will also be held August 6-7 in Sydney, and September 18-19 in London. Follow news and updates from these events on Twitter using #GartnerHR.
About Gartner for HR Leaders
Gartner for HR Leaders brings together the best, relevant content approaches across Gartner to offer individual decision makers strategic business advice on the mission-critical priorities that cut across the HR function. Additional information is available at http://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/human-resources-leaders.
About Gartner
Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world’s leading research and advisory company and a member of the S&P 500. We equip business leaders with indispensable insights, advice and tools to achieve their mission-critical priorities and build the successful organisations of tomorrow.
Our unmatched combination of expert-led, practitioner-sourced and data-driven research steers clients toward the right decisions on the issues that matter most. We are a trusted advisor and objective resource for more than 15,000 organisations in more than 100 countries — across all major functions, in every industry and enterprise size.
To learn more about how we help decision makers fuel the future of business, visit www.gartner.com.
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