When you look around your organization, are you witnessing a change in the way your leadership is performing and behaving? Here is probably why ….

The entire career system in most organizations, is based on using hard functional skills to progress. But when executives reach the top of the organization many different skills are required.

Corporate leaders may find that although they can do the financial analysis and the strategic planning, they are poor at communicating ideas to employees or colleagues, or have little insight into how to motivate people.

The modern Chief Executive requires an array of skills.

Some suggest that we expect too much of leaders. Indeed, “renaissance” men and women are rare. Leadership, in a modern organization is highly complex and it is increasingly difficult – sometimes impossible – to find all the necessary traits in a single person. Among the most crucial skills is the ability to capture your audience – you will be competing with lots of other people for their attention.

Leaders of the future will also have to be emotionally efficient. They will promote variation, rather than promoting people in their own likeness. They will encourage experimentation and enable people to learn from failure. They will build and develop people.

Is it too much to expect of one person? I think it probably is.

In the future, we will see leadership groups, rather than individual leaders. This change in emphasis from individuals towards groups has been charted by the leadership guru Warren Bennis. His latest work “Organizing Genius” concentrates on famous ground-breaking groups, rather than individual leaders. It focuses for example, on the achievements of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, the group behind the 1992 Clinton campaign, and the Manhattan Project which delivered the atomic bomb.

“None of us is as smart as all of us” says Professor Bennis. “The Lone Ranger is dead. Instead of the individual problem-solver, we have a new model for creative achievement. People like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney headed groups and found their own greatness in them.”

Professor Bennis provides a blueprint for the new model leader. “He or she is a pragmatic dreamer, a person with an original but attainable vision. Inevitably, the leader has to invent a style that suits the group. The standard models, especially command and control, simply don’t work. The heads of groups have to act decisively, but never arbitrarily.”

Creating this “new model leader” is our challenge, and will require us to encourage considerable “self-assessment” and “personal auditing” – but challenge is what we thrive on!

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