With the advent of the Internet, distances shrank and with the advent of social media, the clock has shrunk. Leaders are under more pressure to handle issues as they happen, manage teams across multiple geographies and do all these, more often under public glare and commentary. Add to this, the challenge of managing multiple generations of managers and staff. Today’s leader has to strike the right balance between letting go without losing control, build for size while remaining agile and flexible, and allowing the exuberance of youth to challenge without creating chaos. Leadership 24*7 may sound stretching it a bit, but for many a leader today, it is a reality.

Several studies on the impact of investment in leadership development have proved that such investments do improve employee engagement and organizational performance. Organizations across the globe realize the need to have an able leader at helm to steer the organization. While scarcity of good leaders is a challenge, it also makes a strong case for the HR department to take ownership of leadership development initiatives. The proactive measure, besides helping the organization gain competitive advantage, will also serve as a benchmark for others. Can investment in leadership development build sustainable competitive advantage? Yet again, the answer is in the affirmative.

In the corporate world today, we are working in a hyper environment. Targets, deadlines, and performance have become the three buzzwords that our corporate life seems to revolve around. Meetings, conferences, conclaves and even personal interaction with bosses have only one central theme – performance, performance and performance. Competition has unleashed its own unintended consequences. Infatuation with performance has created widespread anxiety in managers. Without performance, no doubt, no organization can survive, let alone succeed. But high performance culture without compassion and care can be dysfunctional as it can lead to alienation, withdrawal or resignation. We can never hope to get the very best from others unless we have feelings for others’ pains, agony and distress, with a caring and helping attitude in their difficult times. Even mere empathizing has the potential to soothe and comfort those in distress.

A major leadership challenge is succession planning. Presently, with all the progress in leadership, succession and building next generation leaders, while some are doing an excellent job many corporations cannot still find top level talent to take charge of corporations. Our public sector banks are a pathetic example of poor succession planning. In the next 3 to 5 years, most top level managers of PSBs are going to retire and nothing is being done by most. We do not yet have a mature methodology to identify and train future leaders. The only methodology we have is to provide them general management training and some training in foreign soil and by foreign experts who have very little idea of leadership or leadership development in India. In India, leadership, besides other things, is an emotional connect. Foreign scholars have limitations in understanding and training leaders for Indian corporations. While there is some work happening in India, we have a long way to go.

Managing workforce diversity and developing an inclusive work culture is imperative for businesses that strive for efficient talent management. Gender, race, nationality, ethnicity and disability are some of the commonly used criteria for employee segmentation and diversity definitions. However, it may be interesting to note that workplaces of today have yet another unexplored diversity dimension, that of the generations. Social, political, cultural, economic and technological climates in which an individual grows up are responsible for certain beliefs and behavioural characteristics of him/her and thus birth year can act as a deciding factor behind segmenting generations. With organisations employing personnel with varied, multidisciplinary skills, the average bandwidth of employee ages has been stretched far and wide. It is therefore significant that organizational leaders do not ignore the need to manage this diversity and leverage the underlying generational differences in the best interests of the organization.