I’m getting ready to attend this year’s Human Resource Technology Conference in Las Vegas. Let me know if you plan to attend – would love to see you there. And if you’re not going, you can check out the details here.
But planning for this year’s trip reminded me of a comment made at last year’s event. One of the speakers said that companies were experiencing a crisis in leadership because they haven’t developed leaders over the past five years (i.e. during the Great Recession). I believe that’s absolutely the case.
In Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report, one of the key findings from their research is that 86% of business and human resources leaders do not believe they have an adequate leadership pipeline. 38% said this was an urgent problem for their organization. It raises the question: if companies realize the problem, have they started investing in their leadership?
One new piece of research would lead us to believe “no”. According to a Harvard Business School study, 40% of respondents felt workers should brace themselves for lower pay and benefits. I have to think if companies aren’t willing to pay employees more, then are they really going to invest training dollars? The same study said organizations are looking heavily at their contingent workforce as a staffing strategy to avoid hiring full-time workers.
Personally, I’m a fan of contingent work. Not as a strategy to avoid hiring full-time employees. If the job needs to be full-time, then it should be full-time. But contingent workers can bring tremendous value to an organization. And many individuals are learning to embrace being a contingent worker. It can truly be a win-win.
However, even contingent workers need to be engaged and trained. For organizations to meet their long-term goals, training has to take place at every level of the organization. This includes leadership training. Being a leader is directly related to our ability to make decisions, communicate effectively, manage conflict, and deliver excellent customer service. Every employee at every level does these things in the course of their daily work.
What I haven’t figured out yet is the reason companies are reluctant to make developing their leadership pipeline a priority. Is it the money? Companies are making record profits. Is it the delivery method? Technology today allows tremendous flexibility to deliver training content. Maybe it’s a bit of both? Or maybe it’s something completely different?
With the increased conversation about the skills gap and the difficulty to find qualified workers, companies have to be getting awful close to this “leadership deficit” moving to a “leadership crisis”. If we’re not there already.
Image courtesy of HR Bartender
Michael says
The reason as I see it is that most Executives simply assume that leadership skills are already on place!
SteveB_LA says
You might want to do some research on companies with “contingent” workers. How many of those workers are happy? I would bet (yes, insert plug for LV here) that most workers (>50%) would rather be full time than contingent.
And, yes, I do enjoy your blog. It does make me think.
Bill Kutik (@billkutik) says
Sharlyn, why don’t you consider the possible reason of naked greed?!? You’ve noted the record profits, yet all the salary studies show companies unwilling to share them fairly with employees, who have created them.
And during the Great Recession training budgets were cut to the bone. With everyone used to getting none, why confuse them by starting now?
Sharlyn Lauby says
Thank you so much for the comments on this post. And my sincerest apologies for the delay in responding. This darn server migration took a lot longer than expected. And it looks like some of the comments made during the migration aren’t showing up on the site. Thanks for your patience as we work through the final stages of the migration.
However, I’ve been reading your comments, and I found an interesting article on freelancing that I wanted to share. http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2014/09/04/freelance-increasingly-its-how-america-works/ The piece references a research study on freelancing. I found it interesting the number of freelancers that are seeing an increase in workload. I also thought it was interesting that freelancing doesn’t appear to be generational.
One thing is for certain. Businesses seem to like the idea of developing a contingent workforce. For those individuals that can figure out how to successfully work in that structure, freelancing could be a great option.