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Good Article: Important Skills For Leaders Of Tomorrow

Being the top executive today in any organization is a demanding job.  In times past, most organizations were based on the hierarchical business model.  At the helm of the ship were the managers with the most tenure that made all the decisions, and at the bottom were employees who sat behind and did what they were asked to do.  But today’s leaders have a more nuanced task. Today, organizations are flatter than ever before, job titles are broader, and the lines of authority have become blurred, especially in professional services firms.  Similarly, the ability to scale technology and capacity to work with a diverse team is critical. So the question is, what skills do you need to maneuver all those factors and lead your organization to success in the future.

Leading in today’s environment is difficult but not impossible. And many people have given opinions on how to do that most effectively.  Experts like Marshall Goldsmith, Beth Kanter and Robin Sharma have done substantial research on the topic. Similarly, organizations like the Washington Post, the Harvard Kennedy School, and the Harvard Business Review put out dozens of articles about the issue.  And in a recent video post on the Harvard Business Review, a panel of experts discussed the same topic, and each person on the panel answered the question: What are the crucial skills for tomorrow’s leaders?

With a panel of experts ranging from HBS professors to former colonels of the U.S. Army to a company CEO, the videos gives various opinions on what skills it takes to lead in the modern era.  See below for the link to the video article and below that for the panelists.

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Title: The Crucial Skill For Tomorrow’s Leader
Source: Harvard Business Review
URL: http://blogs.hbr.org/video/2010/08/the-crucial-skill-for-tomorrow.html

Summary
“Through Imagining the Future of Leadership, a symposium at the Harvard Business School and accompanying blog series, expert thinkers gathered to investigate what is necessary today to develop the leaders we need for tomorrow. ”

Angel Cabrera President, Thunderbird School of Management
Bill George Professor, Harvard Business School and former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic
Daisy Wademan Dowling Executive Director, Leadership Development at Morgan Stanley
Andy Zelleke Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Batia Mishan Wiesenfeld Professor, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, NYU
Evan Wittenberg Head of Global Leadership Development, Google, Inc.
Dr. Ellen Langer Professor, Harvard University
Scott Snook Associate Professor, Harvard Business School and retired Colonel, US Army Corps of Engineers