Four leadership challenges we cannot ignore

DEAR captains of industry and public institutions,

Across industries and organisations, certain leadership concerns seem to repeat themselves decade after decade.

The circumstances change, but when chief executive officers (CEOs), boards and senior management discuss the challenges they face in developing their leaders, the same familiar concerns continue to surface.

They revolve around four primary issues: the inability to see the big picture; move the task, team and Individuals towards corporate goals; build relationships; and practise effective followership.

We hear about silo mentality – managers who are very good within their own functions but struggle to see the organisation as a whole. We hear about managers who deliver results but bruise people along the way.

Others build strong teams but inadvertently create turf and friction with other departments. Some are excellent at taking care of their people but become reluctant to hold them accountable.

We hear about leaders who manage upwards but not downwards, or downwards but not sideways. And increasingly, we hear about execution – where clear corporate strategy becomes slowed, diluted, or resisted as it travels through the organisation.

These are not merely leadership-development issues; they directly affect productivity, efficiency, execution, collaboration, and succession planning.

See the big picture

The first challenge is probably the most familiar: silo mentality. Most people begin their careers by becoming good at something specific. An engineer becomes a good engineer, a finance professional becomes good at finance, and a salesperson develops expertise in markets. Organisations need specialists.

The difficulty begins when a person’s responsibilities expand, but their perspective does not expand with them. A department head continues to think primarily about the department, and a functional leader continues to see organisational issues mainly through the lens of their function. What was once a strength slowly becomes a limitation.

As responsibilities increase, the central question must change. It can no longer simply be: “What is best for my department?” It must increasingly become: “What is best for the organisation?”

Organisations are interconnected systems. What appears efficient for one department may create additional work or problems elsewhere.

This is why senior leaders must develop an enterprise-wide perspective to understand corporate priorities, recognise interdependencies, and make decisions based on what moves the entire organisation forward. Otherwise, highly competent managers may successfully optimise individual parts while collectively sub-optimising the whole. The fundamental transition is clear: From MY AREA to OUR ORGANISATION.

Move the task

The second challenge concerns how managers actually lead. Over time, many managers develop a preferred way of managing people. Broadly, we see three primary orientations: those who focus heavily on the task, those who focus on the team, and those who focus on the individual.

Each has considerable strengths, but problems begin when one orientation becomes dominant at the expense of the other two.

We all need task-oriented managers. They focus on targets, deadlines, standards, and results. They get things done.

But when task orientation becomes excessive, the manager achieves results while bruising people along the way. Everything becomes about delivery, people are pushed rather than developed, and the manager becomes a bottleneck through which everything must pass.

The challenge here is simple: Get the task done without unnecessarily bruising the people.

The team-oriented manager is very good at building camaraderie and belonging. However, there is a point where team building turns into turf building.

The manager becomes fiercely protective of their resources and people, information is guarded, and other departments become competitors rather than collaborators. Ironically, the manager builds a highly cohesive team while simultaneously weakening the wider organisation.

When loyalty to the team becomes stronger than commitment to the organisation, team orientation has turned into silo mentality. The challenge: Build a strong team without building turf.

The individual-oriented manager places strong emphasis on being supportive, caring, and approachable. The problem begins when the desire to care for people turns into a need to be liked by people.

In their eagerness to stay popular, these managers avoid difficult conversations, tolerate under-performance, postpone tough decisions, and repeatedly make exceptions.

A manager’s responsibility is not to win a popularity contest, but to help people succeed while achieving organisational goals. The challenge: Care for the individual without needing to be liked.

Effective leader-managers cannot choose between task, team, and individual. Their responsibility is to balance and move all three towards corporate goals.

Build relationships

We cannot effectively move the task, team, and individuals if we cannot build relationships. Yet, organisational relationships do not move in only one direction. Leaders need to manage in four distinct directions: upwards, sideways, downwards, and self.

Some managers are excellent at managing upwards, but their direct reports tell a completely different story. Others are great downwards, but struggle to collaborate across functions with peers because disagreements become personal and territorial.

And then there are those who struggle with perhaps the most important direction of all: managing themselves. Ego, insecurity, and uncontrolled emotions eventually compromise decisions and professional conversations.

A person who cannot manage themselves will eventually struggle to manage others.

Technical competence may get a manager promoted, but the further one moves upwards, the more results depend on the ability to build trust, manage oneself, and work effectively with people in every direction, especially those over whom one has no formal authority.

Effective followership

Standard leadership programmes focus heavily on teaching people how to lead, but far less time teaching leaders how to follow. Yet, no organisation can function effectively if everybody wants to lead but nobody knows when and how to follow.

At the senior level, a long-serving manager with deep credibility may quietly disagree with a new corporate strategy. Without open resistance, they can simply slow down execution, interpret instructions selectively, or delay implementation. A senior leader with tremendous personal influence can paradoxically become the biggest obstacle to organisational direction.

At the middle-management level, strategy travels through managers before reaching the workforce. Middle managers translate corporate intentions into daily priorities and behaviours. Because change is uncomfortable, middle managers can easily become bottlenecks where strategy is diluted, reinterpreted, or quietly allowed to die.

Even at the operational level, responsible followership is essential. Good followers are not passive; they contribute ideas and challenge assumptions constructively. But once a legitimate organisational decision has been made, discussion must turn into alignment, and alignment into execution.

Dear captains, these four challenges are deeply connected. A leader who cannot see the big picture protects the silo; one who cannot move the task, team, and individuals remains trapped in a single management style; one who cannot build relationships struggles beyond formal authority; and one who cannot practise effective followership becomes the obstacle standing between direction and execution.

These capabilities rarely develop naturally through seniority or titles alone. They need to be deliberately developed through structured management development, coaching, and mentoring.

Perhaps we captains should regularly ask four questions about our leaders: Can they think for the whole organisation? Can they move the task, team, and individuals together?

Can they build relationships in all four directions? And can they practise followership and know when to align and execute?

If we are not happy with the answers, then perhaps these are areas that deserve greater attention in how we prepare and develop our leaders for the future. After all, we cannot prepare people for bigger responsibilities simply by giving them bigger titles. We have to deliberately develop them for the responsibilities ahead.