According to a 2012 survey conducted for the World Economic Forum, 86% of the global working population believes we are in a leadership crisis.
According to a 2014 survey by the Centre for Creative Leadership, when compared with other strategic imperatives, leadership development is ranked as the number priority for most organizations.
According to a 2015 study by Deloitte on human capital trends, 89% of companies are seriously worried about their leadership pipeline. Not only is there a current leadership crisis, but the future also doesn’t look any better.
86% of the global working population believes we are in a leadership crisis. Click To Tweet Leadership development is ranked as the top priority for most organizations. Click To TweetI want to acknowledge the work done by the Gallup Group. They conducted the largest study ever done on employee engagement. The Gallup data confirmed what most managers feared – the majority of the workforce is disengaged: 67% of workers are passively disengaged, meaning their hearts are not in it and they are not doing their best work on any given day. And 23% are actively disengaged, which means, not only are they not into it, they are having a negative effect on their co-workers and driving customers away.
Why is disengagement on the rise? Gallup suggests that the number one factor contributing to employee disengagement is poor leadership from immediate supervisors. In North America alone, an estimated $450B/year is wasted in lost productivity because of employee disengagement.
Yes, the leadership crisis is real and it’s having a massive impact on the world at work.
There is no data to confirm my hypotheses but I would suggest that the vast majority of Church goers are disengaged as well. It’s not the loss of productivity that matters but it is the loss of cultural impact, witness, renewal and transformation that we do not see that is painful.
Many centuries ago St Irenaeus prophetically said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” We are fully alive when we are engaged, passionate, intentional, and enthusiastic. The real tragedy in spiritual disengagement is the diminishing fruitfulness of the Church, especially when we so desperately need a new spiritual impulse capable of transforming everything.
The world is starving for leadership. The world and the Church need you at your leadership best.
Leadership has been around for thousands of years and remains one of the most widely discussed topics today. Hundreds of books, articles and blog posts are written about leadership every year.
Our collective understanding is continually expanding. But as the inner circle of understanding leadership increases, so does the outer edge of ignorance. The more we come to know, the more we recognize we don’t know everything.
After all the focus, study and research, only the most basic definition of leadership is universally accepted: leadership is influence (Maxwell).
That is the one and only agreed-upon definition, leaders have followers. So, if you think you are a leader but have no one following you, then you are only going for a walk.
Perhaps the most important question we can ask is, “Why do people follow?” As we discover consistent reasons, it should shape our understanding of the essence of leadership.
If you want to understand the essence of leadership ask, why do people follow? Click To TweetThe late Stephen Covey discovered three broad categories in terms of why people follow.
On one level people follow out of fear. Leaders obtain followers by coercive power – fear, intimidation and aggression. Followers get along by going along. It is lip-service loyalty, not real followership. The most drastic examples of this kind of leadership are tyranical leaders like Hitler. But lesser leaders today – in business, sports and, yes, the Church, still rely on coercion. Sad, but true.
On another level, people follow because of the benefits that come to them if they do. It is a give and takes relationship. But outside of the area of “transaction”, there is no other influence. Leaders have utility power over followers. A business leader may have her staff for 40 hours a week but she will never enjoy the sweet privilege of mentoring one of them through a difficult personal situation because her transactional influence is limited to the 40 hours at the office. Influence in other areas of life is unwanted and simply not pursued.
The third level of followership is completely different from the first two. The third reason why people follow is not that they must and not for the sake of benefit; they follow because they want to. They follow because they perceive in the leader qualities of character worth following. This is not blind faith nor mindless obedience. It’s not robotic servitude. It is a knowledgeable and wholehearted commitment based on the perceived credibility of the leader.
People willingly follow when they perceive in the leader a character worth following. Click To Tweet Real influence isn't mindless obedience. It's a commitment based on the leader's credibility. Click To TweetLeadership is always in the eyes of other people. For someone to grant another person unspoken permission to influence their life, they must have their trust. That is why the number one job of a leader is to build trust.
In the words of Stephen M.R. Covey, “Trust is the one thing that changes everything.”