Do leaders always perform well in every situation? Does it mean that by becoming a leader in your company, the floor will not drop out around you? Leaders are still regular people with various challenges hindering a proper understanding of leadership roles and their success. Read along to learn more about leadership challenges.
Leadership Challenges Definition
As a crucial part of leadership, challenges represent the common issues and obstacles that managers and leaders face during their work. Within this explanation, leadership challenges also refer to the contemporary challenges that question the accepted beliefs about the value of leadership in workplaces.
What are some leadership challenges at work?
At workplaces, leadership challenges range from budget optimization and product innovation to workplace training and stakeholder negotiation.
Although these leadership challenges are complicated, they create an opportunity for managers and leaders to rise to another level of expertise while allowing them to test themselves and push the organization forward.
We don't grow when things are easy, we grow when we face challenges.1
- Bethany Hamilton
Leadership Challenges in the Workplace
Within a workplace context, leadership challenges can arise from three major sources, which are:
External challenges - these challenges stem from a leader's external environment, consisting of people and situations.
Internal challenges - these challenges stem from a leader's self.
The nature of leadership roles - these challenges stem from the varied nature of different leadership types.2
Let us introduce some typical leadership challenges in the workplace that today's managers and leaders may face.
Fig .1 - Leadership challenges are diverse and complex
Common Leadership Challenges
What lies at the heart of common leadership challenges are four issues challenging the long-standing leadership values: the attribution theory of leadership, the substitution and neutralization of leadership, leadership selection, and leadership training.
Leadership Challenges: The Attribution Theory of Leadership
As the attribution theory of leadership emphasizes the appearance and traits of a leader other than their actual accomplishments, this can create a bias in perception toward the definition of effective leaders at a large scale.
The attribution theory of leadership states that leadership is a mere attribution that people make about other individuals.
Accordingly, under the attribution theory of leadership, leaders who can impress others with positive traits such as being smart, hard-working, assertive, and empathetic are often regarded as effective by their seniors and subordinates.
Otherwise, leaders are associated with negative performance at work.
Likewise, the attribution theory of leadership can also lead to false assumptions about leaders' gender and race.
Stereotypes about leaders' demographic attributions
You can observe common stereotypes in the workplace, such as "young leaders are often more innovative" or "men, rather than women, tend to become leading figures at work." However, it is apparent that in modern workplaces, age is no longer a matter regarding leadership innovation. For example, in the marketing industry, middle-aged managers can still excel at producing innovative TikTok videos as long as they are willing to update and upgrade their knowledge. Likewise, with gender equality being emphasized nowadays, men and women can perform equally well at the management and executive levels.
Leadership Challenges: Substitutes for and Neutralizers of Leadership
While the concept of substitutes and neutralizers of leadership can be complicated to understand, substitutes and neutralizers represent a possible hindrance toward leadership.
Substitutes consist of attributes that can replace the need for a leader's support or ability to create structure, while neutralizers imply attributes that prevent leader behavior from making any difference to follower outcomes.
Under certain circumstances, substitutes of leadership can supplement leaders, thus making leadership less necessary within organizations. In contrast, neutralizers of leadership, on the other hand, prevent leaders from acting as they plan.
What are examples of substitutes and neutralizers of leadership at workplaces?
For example, suppose your employees show a high indifference towards rewards. In that case, this can signal a neutralizer of leadership that invalidates the manager's plan to give monthly incentives to outstanding employees.
Oppositely, when considering creative jobs such as graphic design, the job's intrinsic satisfaction can naturally motivate designers to devote themselves to their work without requiring managers to step in and provide constant encouragement.
Fig. 2 - Overcoming leadership challenges is critical to success
Leadership Challenges: Selecting Leaders
How can companies decide whether individuals are the most effective and appropriate leaders? While vast theories of selecting leaders exist, such as the trait theory of leadership (defining unique qualities and characteristics of effective leaders), or the attribution theory of leadership, there are still high chances that such theories are still relative with no guaranteed outcomes.
Frequently, individuals with superior potential are impaled on a single mistake, while mediocre ones are sometimes raised to great heights because they once got lucky.3
- Melvin Sorcher and James Brant
CEOs and top executives actively seek for potential leaders to plan for their management succession. However, this task is often complex, given the wide definitions of leadership capabilities and personal traits of successful leaders. As a result, many still admit painful mistakes in selecting the wrong individuals for critical positions.
Leadership Challenges: Training Leaders
It is as challenging to select appropriate leaders as it is to properly and efficiently train them for such positions.
Only one in four senior managers report that training was critical to business outcomes.4
- Harvard Business Review
Interestingly, while various companies have spent millions of dollars on leadership training programs worldwide, such programs often do not pay off.
Why do leadership training programs sometimes fail?
A prominent reason for this is that most leaders, even well-trained and skillful ones, find it difficult to apply new knowledge and skills from training sessions back to their departments due to long-standing rigid operational systems or a lack of a "psychologically safe" climate to engage with their subordinates.
Modern Leadership Challenges
Recently, the business world has been surrounded by uncertainty and inconsistency that have created unique challenges for contemporary business leaders. Let's have a look at some most noticeable leadership challenges nowadays.
Leadership Challenges: Covid-19 and its Lasting Impacts
During the post-Covid-19 period, various emerging work models, such as flexible work, agile work, or work-from-home model, require managers and leaders to be more open-minded in listening to their employees' needs and adapting to robust changes.
Everyone should feel empowered to be a leader in their own role and Covid has proved we can take ownership of all of our own roles.5
- Noelle Kelly
How popular is flexible remote work after Covid-19?
According to Microsoft, about 73 percent of employees preferred flexible remote work options after the Covid-19 period.5
Leadership Challenges: Hybrid Organizational Culture
The outbreak of Covid-19 and its lasting impact on creating diverse work models have led to the rise of a more hybrid organizational culture. Accordingly, modern leaders should now emphasize the importance of closer and more personal relationships with their employees.5
For instance, when everyone is present in the office, it is easy for leaders to sense when an individual does not feel great. Thus, leaders can arrange a personal meeting with them to have the problems seen through together. Yet, in a remote situation, leaders need more effort and empathy to understand their employees' feelings truly.
Getting to know everyone on a personal level with flatmates roaming in the background, dogs barking on calls, kids screaming for attention. That sense of connection led to a stronger, more collective culture – we were all in the bunker together.5
- Mark Thompson
Overcoming Leadership Challenges
How can you overcome all the fears, stress, worries, and challenges of being a leader? Let us guide you along with some general tips for overcoming leadership challenges! The following eight tips may sound cliché, but, they indeed remain true through decades:
Stay calm and avoid being too emotional at work,
Communicate effectively with top management and subordinates,
Try to be proactive, not reactive,
Showcase creditability and responsibility,
Be empathetic and thoughtful at solving work conflicts,
Constantly test yourself to realize your strengths and weaknesses,
Try to create an open workplace that fosters creativity and willingness to discuss,
Be flexible to take up various roles other than being a boss at work2
How can leaders evaluate their own performance?
Do you remember the different types of training lessons that we have? Leaders can utilize the 360-degree evaluation method to draw feedback from everyone around them to review leader performance! As leaders must come into contact with almost everyone at work, nothing is more valuable than sincere comments and feedback from people regarding the leaders' behaviors, productivity, and leadership style.
To our dearest current or potential talented leaders, diverse leadership challenges await you at work. Are you now ready to take them on? We bet you already have your answer! What lies at the core of successfully handling leadership challenges is a thorough understanding of leadership and its nature!
Leadership Challenges - Key takeaways
- Leadership challenges refer to contemporary challenges that question the accepted beliefs about the value of leadership in workplaces.
- Within a workplace context, leadership challenges can arise from three primary sources: external challenges, internal challenges, and the nature of leadership roles.
- Four common leadership challenges include the attribution theory of leadership, the substitution and neutralization of leadership, leadership selection, and leadership training.
- Modern leadership challenges feature Covid-19, its lasting impact, and hybrid organizational culture.
References
- Gifford Thomas. We Don't Grow When Things Are Easy; We Grow When We Face Challenges. Leadership First. 2019. https://www.leadershipfirst.net/post/we-don-t-grow-when-things-are-easy-we-grow-when-we-face-challenges.
- Gardner, H. Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership. New York, NY: Basic Books. 1996.
- Melvin Sorcher and James Brant. Are You Picking the Right Leaders?. Havard Business Review. 2002. https://hbr.org/2002/02/are-you-picking-the-right-leaders.
- Michael Beer, Magnus Finnström, and Derek Schrader. Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It. Havard Business Review. 2016. https://hbr.org/2016/10/why-leadership-training-fails-and-what-to-do-about-it.
- Elle Whitehead-Smith. The Challenges of Modern Leadership: What Does the Future Hold?. The Happiness Index. 2021. https://thehappinessindex.com/blog/modern-leadership-challenges/.
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