Are Great Leaders Disappearing?

by Seth Sinclair, Member

Two weeks ago, I posted a blog entry entitled “Leaders Are Made, Not Born.” My post was based on the four skills the American Management Association believes young leaders must master in order to be successful.  (You can read that entry here.)  I was responding to another blogger, who suggested that most young people aren’t learning critical thinking and problem solving, effective communication, collaboration and team building, and creativity and innovation in school—and, because of this, they don’t have the skills to meet the needs of business and government in the 21^st century.

More recently, the Harvard Business Review’s blog has weighed in on this debate.  In a September 20, 2011 post entitled, “Where Have All the Leaders Gone,” (read it here) consultant and author Ron Ashkenaz discusses the phenomenon that today’s most important leaders don’t seem to measure up to our expectations, and that leaders of previous generations inspired more confidence than our present collection. 

Mr. Ashkenaz offers two reasons for this finding.  First, he says, the velocity and volume of issues today’s leaders are confronted with has increased substantially.  He believes previous generations of leaders had more time between decisions than today’s leaders have.  The instantaneous communication technology has brought allows leaders very little time to think, and forces them to move quickly from issue to issue without the time, as he writes, to “think, reflect and plan.”

His second reason is his belief that many of today’s leaders are overly concerned with their stakeholders’ reactions.  They worry too much about making people “happy”—and as a result, they hesitate to do what they believe is right.  According to Mr. Ashkenaz, “politicians seem to base their policies on polling trends, while corporate leaders worry about the reactions of analysts and traders.”

In my blog on the AMA study, I took issue with the blogger’s conclusion, because I believe that it has never been the sole responsibility of schools to teach the skills good leaders require.  On-the-job training, careful listening, modeling the behaviors of mentors and others, and a commitment to lifelong learning—including learning from the kind of leadership programs SAG provides—all are as important, if not more important, than the lessons an aspiring leader learns at even the finest MBA or MPA program.

I disagree with Mr. Ashkenaz as well, because I believe that today’s great leaders are as skilled, or more so, than those of any previous generation.  Among the leaders of previous generations the author admires were Franklin Roosevelt; Winston Churchill; John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.  None of these great leaders were universally recognized as such during their lifetimes, (Churchill, for example, was turned out of office by the people of Great Britain as soon as World War II ended,) and all of their reputations have benefited significantly from the distance that time, and in some cases tragedy, provides.

We do have great leaders in all walks of life today—and future generations, if not their contemporaries, will recognize them as such.  Steve Jobs has been a controversial figure throughout his career; he even resigned from Apple Inc. in the 1980’s after he lost a power struggle with the company’s board of directors, and spent a decade away from the company before returning.  His resignation for health reasons as CEO of Apple last month was greeted with near-universal dismay, however, and I have little doubt that his legend will grow significantly in the years ahead. 

“Don’t it always seem to go,” Joni Mitchell once sang, “that we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone?”  Leaders like Jobs, Jeff Immelt and Jack Welch of GE, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and others (I’ll leave it to you to list the present-day politicians you admire) are all great visionaries, and have mastered the leadership challenges of the beginnings of the 21^st century; just as leaders like Andrew Carnegie; Thomas Edison; and Henry Ford mastered the equally-significant business challenges of the beginning of the 20^th century.

These leaders understand the opportunities faster communications provide; they carve out the time they need to think and plan (and hire others to help them do so); and they—like leaders of every generation—do not hesitate to do what they believe is right.  The game has not gotten harder, in my opinion, but the rules have gotten more complex.  It is our responsibility at SAG, as trainers of tomorrow’s leaders, to help those who will be tomorrow’s leaders understand these new rules and become successful in their chosen fields.

I’d like to know what you think, though: is it harder for a leader to achieve greatness today, and, if so, why?  I’m looking forward to your comments below.