The current NFL season was barely a few weeks old when 21 different quarterbacks were sidelined with a variety of injuries, several of them season-ending. Included were such stars as Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger, New Orleans’ Drew Brees and Jacksonville, Florida’s Nick Foles. Also, just prior to the season’s start, Andrew Luck, a rising star, announced he was retiring rather than face another in a long line of injuries.
What would you do if your leader suddenly wasn’t there?
Sports has adopted the operative phrase “next man up” – and that holds true for the business world, too. Do you have the bench strength in place to step in for your leader should he or she retire or go elsewhere? Have you put a succession plan in place, and do you have talented people ready, willing and able to take on leadership roles?
We expect our leaders to be resilient, especially if they have driven us to success. But the belief that leaders have the endless stamina, ideas and skills it takes to deliver success year after year forms a fallacy. “Great things in business are never done by one person,” Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and creative genius, once noted. “They’re done by a team of people.”
To ensure future success, organizations need to develop tomorrow’s leaders today. That much should be obvious. New requirements of leadership, however, often complicate these efforts. You cannot expect the kind of leadership that worked in the past to continue to be functional in the present or in the future.
Today’s leaders need to have the courage to accept change and to willingly let their bench strength evolve. An organization’s “next man up” will be expected to perform in an environment that’s constantly changing and increasingly competitive. Tomorrow’s leaders must have the ability to revitalize, rebuild and embrace shared leadership approaches to accountability.
Global Leadership, a leadership guide co-authored by Dr. Cathy L. Greenberg, cites the top five leadership competencies of the future as thinking globally, appreciating cultural diversity, developing technological savvy, building partnerships and alliances, and sharing leadership.
Future leaders must demonstrate not only the traditional leadership qualities of vision and integrity but also these newer qualities, such as global thinking, technological sophistication and the ability to use diversity to increase return on investment.
When leaders are prepared, nurtured and enabled to build community, understand themselves and rethink the possibilities of nonlinear strategic planning, great things happen. In short, building a strong bench – in sports and in business alike – remains key to continued success.
Dr. Benjamin Ola. Akande is assistant vice chancellor of International Programs-Africa, director of Africa Initiative and associate director of the Global Health Center at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a former president of Westminster College and served as dean at the Walker School of Business & Technology at Webster University. He has a Ph.D. in economics.