Consciousness-based leadership can defuse unemployment time bomb

As business experts Richard Pike, Loane Sharp and Ted Black pointed out in their 2010 analysis of the SA employment landscape The New Divide, violent revolutions are seldom carried out by an oppressed, hopeless underclass. Violent revolutions erupt when people have been promised a better life and then find those expectations repeatedly disappointed. This is a scenario that South Africa is fast approaching.

No one disputes the short- and medium-term solution either: solve the skills shortage. Despite our unemployment rate, we have a limited pool of qualified professionals - the educational inequalities inherited from apartheid have still not been resolved and most of our youths struggle to complete matric, let alone achieve a tertiary education. International research shows a correlation between the percentage of business graduates in a country's population and that country's economic performance, and we are sadly lacking on that score. We need more effective, higher quality leaders, in government at all levels, in big business and especially in SMEs, as the latter are the primary drivers of job creation. This problem is not insurmountable. With 50 000 leaders we could uplift a country of 50 million - but only if they're the right sort of leaders.

"Before we even discuss a leadership crisis," said Georgina Barrick, CEO of executive search firm Humanity Search & Select, "we need to acknowledge that leadership doesn't just happen, it's something we learn. South Africans get no leadership training at school and most who are lucky enough to get to tertiary levels don't get any there either. There's very little education or investigation of what leadership really is. We're seeing the results in the shortage of leadership talent and mentorship across the board."

Old-style management

Since the industrial revolution, businesses have used one set of criteria when selecting leaders: functional competence. Old-style management is all about optimising processes and streamlining efficiency. But business requirements - and the expectations of employees - have changed since the information revolution. "In an article earlier this year, Barbara Kellerman, the Professor of Public Leadership at Harvard University's John F Kennedy School of Government, put it like this: "Leading by commanding and controlling is out; leading by co-operating and collaborating is in."

Said Barrick: "A lot of her research is about followership as much as leadership - she points out that as power structures become more democratic and information harder to control, authoritarian management becomes impossible, so the best leaders manage through collaboration and consensus. For that to be effective, a leader's team needs to be made up of engaged followers; leadership isn't only for CEOs; it's a skill every member of the team has to have, in order to co-operate and contribute toward the common goal."

Generation Y employees seek more than a pay cheque - they need to be in roles that "work for them". In other words, they're looking for a company that shares their "consciousness". "With leadership no longer a purely top-down process," added Barrick, "successful co-operation requires bottom-up input as well. Feedback and interaction from the team are vital to the modern leader - and that's why it's so important that leaders and their teams share a similar consciousness quotient, which synchs with the consciousness of the company as a whole."

A new-age approach to business

Although it sounds mystical, consciousness is a new-age approach to business backed by scientific research. It refers to eight important behaviours - namely: creativity, openness, trust, courage, self-awareness, confidence, intuition and instinct - that are shared by top leaders. A study in the US, which was replicated in South Africa by Humanity, showed that successful companies have leaders who have high scores in these behaviours. In the fast-paced 21st century, successful leaders need to be able to manage change and adapt to new opportunities constantly - and their ability to do this is reflected in their "consciousness" scores. The social and economic leadership South Africa needs can only be provided by leaders with high "Consciousness Quotients" (CQsTM). If companies, and indeed countries, are going to succeed, they need to find leaders by using search tools that take CQTM into account.

"Consciousness is particularly helpful when searching for talent that is right for a particular role and culture as a supplement to the functional competence required in a job description," said Barrick. "Three different candidates may have exactly the same functional competencies, but which one best fits the role will be determined by the needs of the business in its current state. Is it a mature concern or a start-up? What is the new leader going to have to do - run it, improve it, fix it or even, if it comes to that, dismember it profitably? Assessing consciousness helps us to identify the key behavioural competencies required for any particular role.

"If companies are going to grow and create more jobs, or if government departments are going to succeed in their service delivery challenges, the skills and behaviours missing in senior and middle management need to be addressed," said Barrick. "By focusing on selecting and retaining talent with a high CQTM, you're putting leaders in place who can pass on that skill set to middle management. Exposure to highly conscious leadership, I believe, is a way to springboard a lot of underdeveloped talent into junior leadership roles."

From a technical perspective, the SA skills shortage is being addressed - albeit slowly. Business and the more successful government departments have realised that this is a matter of survival, and funding is being poured into vocational education and training. SAICA's Thuthuka Bursary Fund, for example, has already produced almost 100 African and Coloured accountants from disadvantaged backgrounds, with at least 1200 more in the educational pipeline. "Hard skills" - the functional competencies required in each profession - are being transferred at an increasing rate. However, for long-term sustainability, business will have to address the skills gap in consciousness, too.

The greater the crisis, the greater the need - and SA is suffering a crisis not just of leadership, but of conscious leadership. The research is clear and unequivocal - organisations led by teams rich in CQTM that are more likely to prosper in our evolving environment. Fortunately, companies don't have to wait for consciousness detecting tools to emerge - Humanity Search & Select - a South African search firm has already developed a tool to assess CQTM and has verified it on a sample of over 15 000.

For more information contact Georgina Barrick on +27 (0)11 463 5713 or az.oc.asytinamuh@kcirrabg.