Executive leadership competencies for crisis decision-making in 2015-2025

Future Leader

What does the leader of the future look like?

New and distinctive challenges for leader face?

What does a blueprint for dynamic planning look like?

Competencies and Future Decision-Making

What disciplines or areas must the new leader focus on?

What lessons have past leadership behaviors taught us?

What type of leadership will the current and next generation look for?

Executive Leader Competencies and Crisis Consequences

Scientific Management paradigm influence

Network-Centric paradigm influence

Current and Future Decision-Making and Variable Influences

What does the leader of the future look like?

As the world approaches 2015-2025, leaders can expect rampant change and complexity along with inevitable crises that each change could bring (Modis, 2003).Modis suggested that at the present complexity growth rate "... [by] the year 2025 we would be witnessing the equivalent of all the major milestones of the twentieth-century[i.e. electricity, automobile, DNA structure described, nuclear energy, WWII, space travel, Internet, human genome sequencing] in less than a week" (p. 31). In the paper the researcher attempts to explore the challenges future leaders will be facing. As it is being said that current leadership styles like scientific management will not be able to cope with the period where everyday new technologies are being introduced. This paper discusses the challenges, expected competencies and capabilities needed for future leaders.

New and distinctive challenges for leader face?

Gandossy and Sonnenfeld (2004) posited poor ethical decisions can subvert a business or a whole economy into recession. Drury and Kitsopoulos (2005) and Sample (2002) proposed that unethical military decisions can turn neutral populations into enemy sympathizers or worse. Business and military executive leaders aspire to improve crisis decision-making after improprieties have jeopardized organizations. As it is being said that in the 2015-2025 timeframe, crises confronting business and military executive leaders will likely increase in magnitude and frequency while time available to resolve will decrease. This will be the one great challenge future leaders will be facing. As they will have to made critical decisions within a limited time frame.

In the future, executives will have a greater responsibility and accountability to stakeholders and shareholders to improve consequences when crises arise. Future leaders should be willing to learn and demonstrate competencies required to confront familiar and unfamiliar crises.

What does a blueprint for dynamic planning look like?

Competencies and Future Decision-Making

Considering future challenges and future needs of organization strategies can be developed for future leaders. One suggestion is as Allen (2000) suggested that the military has a history of deriving required competencies from expected missions and strategies. The military derives competencies or mission essential tasks using the Strategy-to-Task method or competency-based programming. Strategy-to-Task is a favored method suggested by many scholars because this analysis forms directly associated mission strategies with competencies. The Strategy-to-Task method was a Scientific Management reduction theory that examined current and near future emission settings for explicit, critical tasks. Strategy-to-Task assessed a leader's ability to train to acceptable standards and identify which tasks were achievable. Tasks that were not achievable by the leader encouraged new skills creation (CJCS). So this method should be included in the curriculum for leadership and management coursed for future leaders.

Further mid and executive level military and business training can capitalize on a different approach to competency development. That is leaders and trainers can collaborate with local universities and higher education institutions to develop essential competency development programs based on functional needs like technology applicability or management. Business and academia can work together to determine knowledge, skills, or abilities needed to be understood by students based on corporate enterprise needs and core business practices in the future.

There is much research (Rogers, 2003) about change, change management, and technology change that suggested a need for continuously creating new leader competencies as systems and technology advanced. The leaders of future should develop these competencies to manage change and to handle new coming technology and its impacts on organization and markets.

Another important task is to train future leader as Bracken (2008) proposed one scenario-based analysis which helps to forecast future technology needs. Using future scenarios, we can train and develop required competencies for future staff and soldier-level.

What disciplines or areas must the new leader focus on?

There are many suggestions on which are the specific areas that the future leaders must focus. Palus (2003) advocated 21st century leaders, whether military or business, should think about the future to plan for the general public's needs. Bracken (2008) encouraged executives to consider futuristic worst case scenarios and case studies to frame executive thinking and decision-making. Others suggested executives continuously observe to collect natural or human-induced event indicators that may indicate a potential crisis.

So it is suggested that leaders should demonstrate knowledge, skills, and abilities required to scan, understand, predict, and resolve issues before problems and crises occur. Business leaders should display skill to adapt to competition, to re establish market share, and to ensure the company's survival. Shareholders should expect leaders to set and achieve goals that foster business solvency. Similarly military leaders should exhibit the competencies that contribute to making wars brief as Heinze indicated citizens expected wars to achieve national objectives while minimizing casualties, a serious demand on leader competencies

As Executive Leaders are in a very distinct position in an organization and they can motivate entire organizations to quickly adapt to crises and achieve high-risk goals. So it is important for the future leader to develop vision and strategy, and encourage performance that achieves long-term success in an organization. Drury and Kitsopoulos (2005) suggested a leader is obliged to become familiar with future crises and to willingly confront crises. So this is suggested that executive leaders must train junior leaders in essential leader competencies even if the resources to do so are small.

What lessons have past leadership behaviors taught us?

Previous research has pointed out many shortcomings and deficiencies in the past leadership behaviors. For instance Nutt (2004) stated that executive decision-makers have often made poor choices when lacking proper knowledge, skills, or abilities. Leader choices can lead to disastrous events, subsequent crises, and unintended consequences, but poor outcomes can be avoided or mitigated by key competencies. Bate & Johnston Jr., (2005) and Denning (2007) suggested Scientific Management was untimely, non-responsive, less agile, and narrowly-scoped in its functional approach. Leadership competencies were focused on accuracy, precision, and efficiencies within a function rather than on agility, effectiveness, or transparency to environmental stimuli.

Similarly P. Denning pointed out that executive leaders avoided chaotic problems and disruptive change. Leaders ignored critical problems because the problems were too difficult to solve or too costly for known technology. These are the lessons for future leaders. In the future, executive leaders will be expected to identify problems that could lead to crisis and take action to reduce risks to organizations.

What type of leadership will the current and next generation look for?

Reed, Bullis, Collins, and Paparone (2004) proposed that in the 21st century, the general public will demand responsive solutions to more complex problems than in the20th century. In the past, business and military leaders confronted systematic problems, which if solved, guaranteed business profits or military victories but with the emergence of Network-Centric leadership, a new competency set began to emerge to achieve agility and effective world-view when approaching crisis. Moffat (2003) and Smith (2002) theorized the Network-Centric Paradigm was emerging though researchers had not focused on 2015-2025 crises and competencies. So the current and future leadership look for a network-centric model in which leader is able to manage the crisis and will have to make quick decisions.

The transformation from Scientific Management to Network-Centric influence helps to explain the history of the decision-making phenomenon and crisis, competency, and consequence variables. Scientific Management was the dominant influence on decision-making in the Industrial and Machine Ages while Network-Centric (General Systems Theory) emerged as the dominant influence in Information and Knowledge Ages. Researcher like Bass, Avolio, Jung, & Berson, (2003); and Mitroff (2004) inferred that during the later stages of 1941-2001 timeframe, there was a developing conflict between the two paradigms. So it is suggested that a typical crisis might have both systematic and chaotic problems to be resolved. In the past that systematic-oriented problems were most readily solved by Scientific Management methods. While adaptive-oriented problems were more readily solved by adaptive Network-Centric methods. As long as crisis problem solving involved systematic and chaotic situations, executive leader decision making would utilize both Scientific Management and Network-Centric approaches.

Current and Future Decision-Making and Variable Influences

In the historical overview, Scientific Management and Network-Centric paradigms' general effects on executive decision-making, crises, competencies, and consequences were presented. In this section, Network-Centric dominance will be discussed more specifically using the decision-making, crisis, competency, and consequence framework. Alberts and Hayes suggested in the post-September 11, 2001 timeframe, the trend toward Network-Centric dominance continued with technology as a primary change enabler. Denning (2007) suggested Scientific Management would not respond effectively to 2015-422025 chaotic crises although some leaders would continue to try to use this outmoded paradigm.

Frederick Taylor (1947) influenced American military and business decision making by introducing Scientific Management principles highlighted by a top-down, hierarchical, autocratic power structure. Taylor introduced an organizational high efficiency concept based on functional time-motion studies. Taylor, a successful mechanical engineer, advocated centralized planning as well as knowledge hoarding and exclusive executive decision-making authority. In a hierarchical organization, data flows upward from lower levels of functional management to higher. Centralized decisions are made based primarily on owner prosperity criteria and rewards to employees. Scientific Management principles made American business efficiency and profitability the world's envy. Principles also guided the U.S. military to become highly efficient in tactics and attrition warfare. Taylor did not address whether a business could remain solvent when challenged by innovative

Several tragic events demonstrated Scientific Management's organizational inadequacy in making timely crisis decisions. Scientific Management is still influential among some business and military leaders and organizations. Denning (2007) pointed out that Scientific Management methods are still useful in solving systematic problems, but not in solving chaotic and adaptive problems that often lead to crisis. Others implied that competitors will continue to exploit poor information flow, slow decision-making, and lack of innovation in exploiting competitive advantages.

Conclusion

In concluding the above discussion the leaders of future organization will have to face more challenges and crisis that the currently leaders are facing. As the technology advances and markets will be vast there will be challenges for the leaders to manage and adopt to fastly occurring changes. To cope with future challenges, leaders will need competencies and fast decision making ability according the situation.

Beginning in the second decade of the 21st century, executive decision-makers who do not have the leadership competencies necessary to appropriately respond to human-induced and naturally occurring crises will adversely affect the lives and livelihood of tens of millions of people within hours.

The systematic elimination of the most consequential threats due to low probability as advocated in risk management theories gives a false sense of security to organizations (Bracken, 2008). Crises will occur and they likely will come from outside the managed risk areas. Lack of preparation for the worst case is justified by flawed risk management assumptions and resource misallocation. At the strategic thinking level, executives should use risk management with great caution.

Executives should develop their organizations into learning organizations to achieve adaptive capacity in order to respond to changing situations. Rogers (2003) suggested as technological and organizational change increased, new executive leader competencies would be needed. Competencies could be based on specific crisis or cumulative multiple crises affect. Some articles mentioned addressing current and past crises with new technology or new leader competencies, but not 2015-2025 crises.

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