OUR WORLD IS IN THE MIDST OF A LEADERSHIP CRISIS

Most business owners, C-Suite executives, professional service providers, entrepreneurs, and school administrators instinctively know that strong leadership is essential for the overall success of their organization.  In most organizations, however, there is a lack of urgency to provide leadership training to improve the leadership skills of their leaders and managers. That lack of urgency is driven by a belief that the organization’s current leadership capacity — and subsequent performance of their organizations — is good enough. But are your organization’s managers and leaders really good enough?

The reality is, right now, we are facing a very serious leadership crisis in our world.

The leadership crisis I’m referring to is not just focused on the current political climate in the United States or in any other country for that matter, although there is plenty of room for improvement in our political leaders.

The leadership crisis I’m referring to is a global leadership crisis that is having a negative impact on our businesses, political systems, global economy, global environment, and most importantly people from around the world.

We currently have over 130 million people in the U.S. workforce alone who go home every day after a hard day’s work feeling they work for a company that doesn’t care about them. When you stop and think about it, that’s seven out of eight people in the workforce. Most of today’s business leaders are driven by numbers, and if that applies to you, then these numbers demand your immediate attention.

To make matters worse, according to the 2017 Gallup Report State of the American Workplace, only 30% of the U.S. workforce is currently engaged in their work. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is roughly 2-to-1. That means the vast majority of U.S. workers (70%) are not engaged in their work. When people are not engaged in their work, they are also not personally fulfilled and they are not reaching their full potential.

Indeed, one third (33%) of all workers feel like they have reached a dead-end at their job. Slightly more than half of all employees report that they are actively looking for a new job or watching for openings. (Gallop 2017) Only 20% of all employees feel very passionate about their jobs.

This lack of employee engagement is a serious problem that has significant implications for the performance of American and other companies along with the U.S. and global economies.

Research and analysis conducted by our partner The Ken Blanchard Companies show that the average business organization is forfeiting over $1 million per year in untapped potential because of less-than-optimal leadership practices. According to the recent Gallup Report, when aggregated across all organizations, actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. economy up to $65 Billion in lost productivity annually.

The financial implications associated with the Global leadership Crisis are staggering, however, that is merely the tip of the iceberg. When it comes to its overall impact, our global leadership crisis is also contributing in a very big way to the healthcare crisis. How, you ask? Because 74% of all illnesses in this country are chronic. The biggest cause of chronic illnesses is stress, and guess what… the biggest cause of stress is unfulfilling work.

Want more proof that the Global Leadership Crisis has very real and serious implications?  Okay, how’s this: there’s a 20% increase in heart attacks on Monday morning between 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. as people start thinking about and getting ready to return to work. Speaking of the poor relationships between employee health and the leadership crisis, according to the Mayo Clinic – one of the leading healthcare providers on the planet – the person you report to at work, your supervisor, is more important to your overall health than your family doctor.

“According to the Mayo Clinic, your supervisor is more important to your health than your family doctor.” – Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller

But wait, because there’s more.

The old leadership paradigm of profits above everything else is also at the root of several global sustainability issues, including global air and water pollution, energy resilience, global pandemics, species extinction, food resilience, waste disposal, poverty reduction, water shortages, climate change, natural disasters, and global terrorism.

What Is Causing The Leadership Crisis?

The poor relationships between employees and their leaders or managers and the organizations they work for is at the root of this crisis.  These poor relationships have very serious implications for the future of American companies and the world.

Approximately 20 million employees (20%) are actively disengaged at work. These employees have bosses from hell that make their employees miserable, roam the halls of their organizations spreading discontent and make the problem worse. Another 50 million American workers (50%) are not engaged in their work. Instead, they’re just kind of there. They are certainly not inspired by the work they are asked to do or their bosses and managers.

This leadership crisis is also affecting our children. Have you ever really thought about whether our school administrators and the principals in our schools really know how to care for the teachers who are responsible for teaching our children while they’re at our schools? Do you know that 71% of the teachers in this country report that they are disengaged in what they’re doing?

If you are a parent who sends your children to school every day and assumes that the teachers will take good care of your children while they are in their care, the fact that nearly three-quarters of all teachers are not engaged in their work should scare the dickens out of you! Even if you are a not the parent of school-aged children, this fact should still alarm you because if children live in your community, in either a positive or negative way those children will have an effect on the quality of life in your community.  Children will either grow up, start living into their full potential and become contributing members of your community or they will not. If they don’t, there is a good chance they will become a burden on the community. In the worse case, they may even become a menace to society.

Based on recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, high school dropouts are nearly three times more likely to be unemployed than college graduates. Even when they do find jobs, high school dropouts still earn approximately $8,000 a year less than high school graduates and approximately $26,500 a year less than college graduates, according to calculations by the Alliance for Excellent Education.

As noted above, the consequences of receiving a poor education extend far beyond the impact on the individual students. Research by the Alliance for Excellent Education found high school dropouts also influence a community’s economic, social, and civic health.

Data regarding inmate’s attainment of education while incarcerated is sparse, but a 2004 survey of inmates in state and federal correctional facilities by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 67 percent of inmates in America’s state prisons, 56 percent of federal inmates, and 69 percent of inmates in local jails are high school dropouts.

Too Bad For The Dropouts, But What Does That Have to Do With Me, the Global Leadership Crisis, and My Business?

If you think the high school dropout rate has nothing to do with you, I submit you may be engaging in short-sighted thinking and missing a big part of the picture.  According to an Alliance for Excellent Education report, we as a nation could save as much as $18.5 billion in annual crime costs if the male high school graduation rate increased by just 5 percentage points. In addition to the cost savings, the nation would also see a decrease in annual incidents of assault by nearly 60,000. Acts of larceny would decrease by more than 37,000; motor vehicle theft would decline by more than 31,000; and burglaries by more than 17,000. It would also prevent nearly 1,300 murders, more than 3,800 rapes, and more than 1,500 robberies.

Maybe you are fortunate and neither you or anyone you know has ever been a victim of a crime. Thus, you still believe this has nothing to do with you.  If that is you, I’m sorry my friend because it does. Guess who pays the costs associated with keeping people incarcerated and helping the victims of crimes get their lives back on track? Yes, you’re starting to get it now, right? It’s you and me in the form of increased taxes.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

The good news is, it doesn’t have to be this way.  We can solve the Global Leadership Crisis and help provide relief from many of the collateral consequences that have arisen from it. We just need to engage our heads and our hearts to embrace a new leadership paradigm that acknowledges the value and worthiness of every individual contributor and stakeholder in our organizations and recognize that everybody in this country, and indeed, everybody on the planet matters.

Not only has Gallup’s research found an alarmingly high number of employees are not engaged, but it also found that the top 25% of teams — those teams that are best managed — when compared to the bottom 25% in any workplace — the teams who are worst managed — have nearly 50% fewer accidents and 41% fewer quality defects.

Teams in the top 25% versus the bottom 25% also incur far less in healthcare costs. Thus, having low employee engagement caused by poor leadership leads to our workplaces being less safe, employees having more quality defects, and disengagement — which again results from terrible managers — is driving up the country’s healthcare costs. On the other hand, having highly engaged, inspired and well-led teams lead to lowering healthcare costs, improving productivity and increasing profitability.

How Can We Solve the Leadership Crisis?

As business leaders, we have an opportunity standing before us to profoundly change the world. Not just with new and innovative products and disruptive services, but also in a much more profound way by realizing and fully embracing our responsibility to create workplace environments where people can feel safe to fully express themselves – discover, develop, and share their individual gifts with the world – and then be recognized and appreciated for doing so.

Full Spectrum Human Leadership is Not a New Aged Solution.  Instead, It Is a Sustainable Way to Lead A High Performing Organization in the 21st Century

For some, the Full Spectrum Human Leadership opportunity may seem too “woo-woo.” Others may view it as in such sharp contrast to the old leadership paradigm that most were taught in business school that they are unwilling to even consider it.

If you find yourself in that mindset, while we acknowledge the old shareholder value and profits first leadership paradigm produced positive results for the elite few throughout the industrial revolution, it no longer works in the 21st Century.

Even when that leadership style worked for the elite, it frequently left a wake of destruction in the environment (climate change, natural disasters, pollution, species extinction, water shortages, waste disposal problems, pandemics, and energy resilience) and the overall economy (2008 economic collapse caused by bank leaders that made reckless bets, credit rating agency leaders that endorsed risky mortgage-backed securities and government regulators who overlooked warning signs until they threatened the total collapse of the global financial system).

We are not the only ones making bold claims regarding the Global Leadership Crisis.  Indeed, after conducting 14 formal studies and more than a thousand interviews, directly observing dozens of executives in action, and compiling innumerable surveys, John Kotter the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at the Harvard Business School, and a New York Times best-selling author says:

I am completely convinced that most organizations today lack the leadership they need.

Professor Kotter is not the only Harvard professor to express such concerns. Shoshana Zuboff, the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita, at the Harvard Business School conceded:

We managed to produce a generation of managers and business professionals that is deeply miss-trusted and despised by a majority of people in our society and around the world. This is a terrible failure.

Bill George, Harvard Business School Professor and former Medtronic CEO says:

The problem is we have a wrongheaded notion of what constitutes a leader. They’re driven by an obsession with leadership. At the top, it says every successful business leader has to make the shift from “I” to “We.”

Not People Over Profits… Instead, Its About People in Harmony With Profits

Some may misunderstand what this Full Spectrum Human Leadership shift represents and suggest this new leadership paradigm means we now place people over profit. That, however, is not correct. Rather, Full Spectrum Human Leadership stands for the principle of people in harmony with profit.

Full Spectrum Human Leadership has at the core of its foundation people, and a profound sense of responsibility for the people we invite into our organizations.

With that responsibility as our backdrop, we add to that responsibility the need for organizations to have a purpose to inspire the people in its care that is larger than shareholder value. We couple an inspiring purpose with creating value for all of our stakeholders.

Next, we let all of our people know that we appreciate them and know that they make a difference in either the success or failure of our organizations. We also stand for the principle of recognizing and publicly showing appreciation for our people who make it possible for our organizations to thrive.

We measure the success of our organizations, not just by the growth in our share value, sales, market share, or leadership compensation, but also by the way we touch the lives of the people we do business with… all of them. Our customers and clients, our team members, our bankers, our vendors and suppliers, and our communities. The way we intentionally create a culture that positively touches all these stakeholders and the way we operate in alignment with the core values of our organizations is what Full Spectrum Human Leadership is all about. Indeed, it is the foundation upon which to base everything.

Full Spectrum Human Leadership produces real-world positive results.  

Full Spectrum Human Leadership is grounded in the principles of a benchmark level of humanistic performance and a stakeholder relationship model in which employees and customers are not just contractually served by organizations, but instead actually loved by organizational leaders and managers.

High performing companies whose leaders embrace this leadership paradigm include Amazon, Costco, Caterpillar, IKEA, JetBlue, New Balance, Patagonia, Trader Joe’s, Toyota, Whole Foods, and Barry-Wehmiller. Although none of these companies are perfect, they all espouse and attempt to practice unusually high standards of respect and care for their various stakeholders. They also operate their organizations based upon a set of intentional values, and they hold their people responsible to working and behaving in alignment with such values.

Most importantly to those who embrace the need for financial success as a measure for organizational success, companies that operate based upon the new leadership paradigm hands down outperform the so-called “good to great” companies and report that over a ten year period they outperformed the “good-to-great” companies 1,026 percent to 331 percent over the market.

Do You Still Think the Leadership Inside Your Organization is “Good Enough?”

Now that you know the facts, perhaps you have now become concerned about a leadership crisis inside your organization. If so, then perhaps you are also ready to make the move from the old leadership paradigm to the new leadership paradigm – Full Spectrum Human Leadership.

Without a doubt, you must now realize that the key to your organization’s future success is making the shift from “I” to “We” and switching your focus from trying to become the best in the world to constantly striving to be the best for the world.

If you are ready to leave the past behind you. If you are ready to boldly and courageously learn how to lead your organization into the 21st Century. If you are ready to learn how to inspire your people, we can and we will help you. All you have to do to begin the journey is raise your hand and click the button below.

Rick Petry trains some of the world’s most effective people-centric and values-driven business leaders and managers and provides them with the world’s most widely used leadership development programs and services that deliver real ROI on your training dollars.

If up until now, your organization has been operating with less-than-optimal leadership practices and a lack of urgency to improve the leadership skills of your executives and managers, you can no longer afford to ignore the ways the old school leadership paradigm is affecting the performance of your organization.

So do not delay. Contact us today… we can help.

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Imagine a workplace culture where there’s excitement in the air, where everything is done to enhance the customer experience, where innovation thrives, and teams easily adapt to unforeseen circumstances, where your senior leadership team works toward a shared vision of success, and where people genuinely care for one another, feel recognized and are supported within the organization.

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The workplace culture described above isn’t just an imaginary organizational culture that exists only in the land where rainbows appear every day and unicorns dance on candy-coated clouds. Instead, high performing values-driven cultures like this are intentionally created by the leaders of the best performing organizations on the planet.

The good news is if your organization is currently suffering from less than high-performing leadership, low employee engagement or other leadership or culture-related problems, we can help you train your leaders to become high performing servant leaders and transform your culture from a poorly performing culture to a high-performance values-driven culture, all while you are surrounded with luxury.

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In today’s world, great coaching is critical to the development, growth, and performance of the most valuable part of your business, your people. Unfortunately, most managers are not great coaches. We help managers become great coaches. Coaching Essentials helps leaders to integrate coaching into their leadership style by developing coaching skills and applying new behaviors to help employees reach higher levels of performance and professional development.

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