New ways of working, growing complexity, higher expectations, and lasting uncertainty over geopolitical or economic trends are challenging for everyone, especially managers and leaders. Organisations, teams, and external stakeholders are asking more from company leaders, many of whom are struggling to develop their own capabilities or reskill fast enough to cope, let alone thrive.  

How can fast-growth enterprise and mid-size firms update what we understand about essential management and leadership capabilities and equip their leaders and managers with the right capabilities for success?

Are under-skilled management teams holding companies back?

Successive research has shown the need for modern management skills communicated transparently and authentically. And even more concerning for organisations in the longer term is that many lack the skilled leadership to guide them towards successful growth and transformation.   

A 2024 PwC survey of CEOs found that almost half (45%) are not confident that their company will survive if it continues on its current path. The World Economic Forum 2023 Job Report found that almost four out of ten (38%) respondents felt that skills gaps in the organisations’ leadership is a key obstacle to transforming their business in the period 2023-27. Meanwhile, research by Slack and UK business lobbying organisation Be The Business found almost half (45%) of UK firms considered poor management to be their biggest barrier to growth.

Smaller companies often tend to prioritise growth above all other factors, but this approach may be making their longer-term development even tougher. The WEF report also found that SMEs are 20% less likely to identify lack of skilled talent as a barrier to transformation than large corporations.

Most concerning of all, senior executives have long worried they had effective reskilling plans to to take workforces with them: a PwC workforce survey back in 2021, only 30% of leaders said they were doing what’s necessary to build high levels of trust between workers and their direct supervisors.

Rethinking leadership learning

Responding to such a complex and fast-changing training market environment, learning providers are rethinking the concept of management & leadership programmes and how they can be implemented and evaluated in the flow of work across resource-constrained businesses.

Drawing the lessons of designing L&D training for an increasingly digitised world – and particularly sights from delivering people-centric L&D programmes amid the upheavals of recent years – providers have not only redefined the key knowledge that exceptional managers and leaders need but also made programme delivery itself a simpler task.

In a world being reshaped daily by technology innovation and especially, generative AI, company leaders might already be feeling daunted by the sheer scale of management and workforce reskilling needed. LinkedIn data predicts that job skills sets will change by 65% by 2030. More than half (55%) of LinkedIn members polled earlier this year suspect that their jobs change to some extent through the rise of generative AI. Leaders need new skills to be truly authentic and empathetic leaders – as well as the capabilities to organise regions, business units and teams in today’s distributed organisations.

The 2023 WEF survey noted specifically that while many organisations tend to identify technical capabilities such as data analytics and project management before so-called “softer” ones, such as leadership and social influencing, these softer or human/power skills are already a top three priority for employers. Clearly, today’s organisations are seeking to accelerate leaders’ reskilling and ability to adapt to the increasing pace of change – even as they strive ever harder to anticipate and satisfy their customers’ needs.

Core capabilities

As a result, leading providers have combed organisations’ management needs and workplace skills research and identified a core of critical capabilities that exceptional leaders and managers in different organisations need to develop to be successful. Some of the capabilities are enduring, others evolve, but they are common to all organisations and reflect many different organisational contexts and cultures. As a result, they provide emerging leaders or aspiring managers with the broadest foundations with greater flexibility for their future development, rather than picking discrete or individual skills to acquire in a largely tactical way as managers progress. This ‘core skills’ approach also helps companies strike a balance between identifying defined capabilities that will be needed by future leaders and those already established in senior roles that might be having to acquire real-world competencies as they go along.  

While there are some differences among different providers, the key skills broadly comprise: leading inclusively; being authentic; growing talent; assisting change readiness; establishing psychological safety; having straightforward conversations; building connections and relationships; creating purposeful and agile plans; delivering sustainable performance; and providing direction and clarity.

Capabilities tend to have two main impacts across different levels in organisations:

1)   Managers and leaders at different hierarchical levels need the same capabilities – but they show up differently depending on the level

2)   Capabilities can apply at organisational, team and individual levels

Whilst structures and practice will vary across organisations, the most important leadership and management capabilities are highly consistent. Managers of people, managers of managers, and senior leaders and executives will all need these key capabilities.

Leading providers’ latest leadership programmes enable these organisational needs and core capabilities to be organised into agile and modular frameworks, with learning elements customisable to the organisational context and goals.  These learning programmes also enable the client organisations to prioritise their main capabilities to reflect their characteristics and leadership maturity.

Preconfigured approaches

The second fundamental shift by L&D providers is to be able to provide these programmes at pace and in a cost effective way. Today’s companies have less appetite for spending a long period designing and creating programmes from scratch. So to have a pre-configured starting point, helps organisations and the provider to tailor the solution to meet the clients needs, quickly. This preconfigured approach to programme design and delivery enables companies’ leadership training to not only be more authentic, modern and flexible – brought into the flow of work for busy companies, teams and individuals – but also to take the heavy lifting out of programme implementation.

Highly adaptive and based on pre-curated content and approaches, these new leadership programmes can not only respond to the changing dynamics facing organisations of all sizes and industry sectors, but they also simplify the task of programme design, customisation and delivery for busy companies.

Such framework approaches also ensure that learning programmes are easily integrated with corporate goals and strategy as well as being rapidly implemented in any type of organisation. Highly adaptable and digital content options from L&D providers also generate the engagement and outcomes data that simplify learning outcomes monitoring and evaluation.

Such programmes help develop exceptional managers and leaders to gain essential soft and technical skills, based on essential capabilities and leading providers’ innovative learning methodologies. These learning programmes are characterised by a human-centric approach to learning; they are delivered as an end-to-end journey that equips leaders with touchstone skills and the authenticity and openness regarded as essential for success.  

With these programmes delivering a balance of engaging learning experiences, pre-curated content and tailored learning environments, employers can quickly imbue their promising managers and leaders with authentic, empathetic and game-changing leadership capabilities. At the same time, they can achieve the critical mass needed for change and success in their workplace.

Core capabilities delivered

Today’s organisations face a dual challenge of identifying the essential skills and capabilities needed for their existing and emerging leaders and managers and then finding the best way to deliver contextualised learning and development with sufficient momentum to hit required company targets. Today’s capabilities-focused and in the flow of work leadership and management programmes can meet leadership needs for organisations through L&D programmes that deliver greater focus, flexibility and scalability than has been previously achieved. Whatever the company, leaders will gain rapidly-deployable, flexible and scalable learning pathways which can be adapted at the pace their organisation demands.