The paradox of gifted leadership: developing the generation of leaders

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the paradox of gifted leadership – namely that executives who are gifted in leading their organizations may not be able to develop leaders under them – creating a challenge in developing the next generation of leaders.

To help confront this paradox the paper highlights insights for how executives approach developing others by drawing on assessment data from over 100 executive leaders and 900 observers. Additionally, the paper reflects on current research and observations on talent management best practices and offers a call‐to‐action for establishing a leadership development framework.

Senior leaders do not get too close or too personal with their co‐workers and this isolation can inhibit their ability to identify first hand individuals who might be in the up‐and‐coming next generation of leaders. Likewise, there is a perception that executives are more concerned with advancing their own careers than helping others move up the ladder. Finally, in environments with informal talent management processes, executives can be drawn towards finding and grooming mirror images of themselves or worse may succumb to organizational politics and favoritism when it comes to promotions and advancements.

There are multiple “influencers” that come into play to shape an executive's behavior and perceptions in their struggle to be an effective leader. Hopefully, with a better awareness of these influencers we can bring balance to how we define (and perhaps influence) effective executive leadership.