Business evolves rapidly. As a leader, you must continually improve your skills to make a significant impact. But, addressing leadership gaps can be difficult when advancing your career.
According to Zippia, 83 percent of organizations strive to develop leaders at every level, but only five percent offer opportunities to achieve that. As a result, leading in the digital age can be challenging whether you’re new or experienced.
If you want to become a more effective leader, here are five leadership gaps that might hold you back and how to overcome them.
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1. Confidence
Many leaders lack confidence. According to a report by global leadership consulting firm DDI, only 40 percent of leaders agree that their organizations have high-quality leadership.
One contributing factor is imposter syndrome—a feeling that can make you doubt your accomplishments and feel like a “fraud.”
It can also make you:
- Hesitate to take on new challenges
- Overwork to avoid perceived shortcomings
- Struggle to accept praise
While imposter syndrome is common if you’re a new leader, you can experience it even if you’ve led a team for years. One of the best ways to build confidence as a leader is by developing a personal brand—the intentional, strategic practice of defining and expressing your value.
“It’s the amalgamation of the associations, beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and expectations that people collectively hold about you,” write Harvard Business School Senior Lecturer Jill Avery—who teaches Personal Branding, one of seven courses comprising HBS Online’s Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program—and her co-author, HBS Executive Fellow Rachel Greenwald, in the Harvard Business Review.
Building a personal brand can boost your confidence by reminding you of your capabilities and how you demonstrate them to your team. As a result, you can be more open to new challenges and accepting of well-deserved praise.
2. Strong Relationships
An often-overlooked leadership competency is fostering strong team relationships to boost employee engagement.
According to analytics and management consulting firm Gallup, the annual employee engagement rate has bounced back since the pandemic. However, the number of employees who feel connected to their organization’s mission and purpose has decreased.
One of the best ways to keep employees engaged and improve their loyalty and retention is by establishing psychological safety—allowing interpersonal risk-taking within your team to encourage members to speak up without fearing consequences.
“Overcoming challenges requires a strong sense of psychological safety and disciplined learning practices,” says HBS Professor Amy Edmondson in the online course Dynamic Teaming, also part of CLIMB. “This is where you come in. As a leader, it’s your job to unlock the potential of your team and create the best possible chance for breakthrough performance.”
If you want to create a psychologically safe workplace, it’s crucial to establish open communication and provide constructive feedback. Doing so won’t just build strong bonds but foster a culture of ethics and accountability, boost team performance, and improve employees' ability to innovate.
3. Adaptable Communication
As a leader, you must effectively communicate to build trust, align efforts, and drive positive change. However, adapting to colleagues’ diverse needs and preferences is one of the most difficult leadership communication skills to master—especially through rigid, established structures with increasingly global, dispersed teams.
“Now, the most common forms of collaboration aren't contained within stable teams but rather occur in shifting, dynamic forms driven by the nature of work at different times,” Edmondson says in an article about CLIMB.
Edmondson is referring to dynamic teaming—working in groups with fluid membership to navigate ever-shifting circumstances and tasks.
According to Edmondson, dynamic teaming results from a “VUCA business world.”
VUCA stands for:
- Volatile: Rapid changes, ups and downs
- Uncertain: Inability to predict future events or societal values
- Complex: The world’s increasing interconnectedness
- Ambiguous: Unsureness of events’ and signals’ meanings
“To move from traditional management to managing in a VUCA world requires adopting a new mindset,” Edmondson says in Dynamic Teaming. “Today’s world requires cross-functional and dynamic teaming. It’s your job—the leader’s job—to move your team and organization toward that mindset.”
By ensuring your employees have a clear direction for executing strategies and overcoming challenges, you can help them thrive in a VUCA world.
4. Digital Integration
Technology is vital in business. However, many leaders face the challenge of effectively integrating digital tools to improve operations and the customer experience.
On a recent episode of The Parlor Room podcast, HBS Professor Linda Hill—who teaches CLIMB's Leading in the Digital World course—discusses the importance of digital integration in modern leadership.
Listen to the full podcast episode below, or watch it on YouTube:
Hill shares the story of a business leader, Nicole Jones, who created an innovation lab at Delta Air Lines to evaluate and identify digital tools to improve the customer experience.
While Jones’s understanding of technology was an asset, Hill attributes much of her leadership success to her ability to collaborate. By gaining the support of the government, the Transportation Security Administration, and other Delta departments, Jones helped create a “touchless” experience, enabling customers to move through the airport with greater convenience and ease.
“So we see people in these roles where she has a team of 16 or 20 people to really bring in digital transformation in the customer experience,” Hill says. “And that requires bridging with all of these different categories of people to get stuff done.”
If you want your team to be creative problem-solvers, like Jones, find ways to integrate digital tools in the workplace. In doing so, you can help your company stay relevant, competitive, and capable of delivering exceptional customer experiences.
5. Agile Leadership
A lack of agile leadership—anticipating market shifts and quickly pivoting strategic initiatives—is another leadership gap to consider.
On The Parlor Room, Hill discusses why focusing on value alone in your strategic planning won’t lead to long-term success.
“It's not enough to be a value creator,” Hill says. “You also must be a game changer. You must be able to identify not only what you should be doing but what you could be doing and then figure out how to deliver on that.”
This is particularly important as business evolves and calls for leading and adapting to change.
“The greatest leaders that I’ve met are always thinking about how they're preparing for the future as they also deliver for the present,” Hill says. “And preparing for the future is really about creating a team or an organization that actually can be agile because the world does change.”
By embracing the role of a change agent, you can better anticipate market shifts, pivot strategies, and navigate new trends and technologies—in turn, helping your organization remain competitive and relevant.
Bridge Your Leadership Skills Gap
Determining how to grow as a leader can be challenging. One option to consider is enrolling in an online leadership development program, like CLIMB.
In CLIMB, you can apply course concepts and insights from industry leaders through real-world cases and interactive exercises to develop forward-looking digital leadership skills and business competencies to advance your career.
Do you want to address and overcome your leadership gaps? Explore our yearlong Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB) program, comprising seven courses for leading in the modern business world. Download the CLIMB brochure to learn about its curriculum, admissions requirements, and benefits.
