‘Leadership bench strength crucial to company’s success’

DDI’s latest Global Leadership Forecast underlines how organisations are struggling to find leaders to take up critical roles

Global leadership consulting firm DDI brought out its tenth edition of Global Leadership Forecast with responses from 1,827 human resource professionals and 13,695 leaders from 1,556 organisations around the world.

The research spanning a vast surface area at multiple levels — most notably, the fact that it took in 50 countries and 24 major industry sectors — provides key trends that mould the future of leadership. The key findings are:

1. Intense talent war

Overwhelmingly, the 529 CEOs that were surveyed ranked talent-related challenges as the ones that keep them up at night. CEOs are deeply sensitive to the fact that their most crucial group of workers — highly skilled specialists and future leaders — may leave for a better experience at a rival company, change career paths, or even take a break from the workforce due to burnout.

2. Leadership bench

Companies are struggling to build their leadership benches in a tough labour market; the pandemic and Great Resignation have certainly not helped matters. Only 12% of the companies have reported confidence in the strength of their bench; and these companies are reaping significant benefits. To address the issue of leadership shortage, companies need to look for leadership potential in unexpected places.

3. A crisis of trust