What skills do you think the next generation of leaders should have?

[Eric Garland]

Tomorrow, I am speaking before the International Association of Corporate and Professional Recruiters. This group helps recruit leaders for organizations around the globe.

Curiously, what kinds of skillsets do you think the leader of tomorrow should master? Or (he asks knowingly) do you think they are fine as they are?

[Christopher Largent]

Allowing for the fact that there could be MANY skillsets necessary, how about if we start with dialogue skills? The ability to listen, process what the other person said NON-JUDGMENTALLY, consider it, and examine it openly and carefully is the beginning. After that, dialogue requires being able to inquire into our own ideas and positions - why do we hold them? how did we get them? what are their implications? - and do the same with the person with whom we are dialoguing (if 'dialogue' may be a verb). If we respond, again non-judgmentally, from that standpoint, we have a good chance of engaging in what physicist David Bohm called the dance of dialogue. How does that strike anyone?

[Jason]

wow chris, you beat me to the punch. i was also going to go with "dialogue". the next generation should take their cues from the ground up, rather than ordering from the top down.

[James Lee]

I'd suggest that the leaders of tommorrow may need to be better team players - sharing information, power, and financial incentives.

We've been in an era of CEO's as capitalist idols, and now we are tearing them down. Only now are we learning that they may have been clueless all along. It's a problem of information flows - maybe they weren't getting the information that they needed to get. Similarly, there is a lot of resentment about pay and compensation.

It all boils down to changing the concept of what a "leader" really is. It is a "boss", or something more like a coordinator?