10 Challenges of Senior Leadership

The demands on leaders to develop strategy, motivate teams, stimulate innovation, monitor progress, manage multiple stakeholders, etc.—not to mention prioritizing their own personal development—are substantial and made heavier by the complexity and uncertainty of the modern workplace. In fronting these demands leaders need a clear understanding of the various personal and organizational challenges they face.

Research from the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), the global learning organization solely focused on developing leaders, provides a valuable starting point. Based on studies made over the past few years into 7,000 organizations and 48,000 leaders, CCL’s opening observation is that, while all leaders require drive, competence, interpersonal skills, and agility, there are challenges that are specific to each level of leadership—the rookie frontline manager new to leading a team, the middle manager trying to grasp operational processes, the senior leader struggling to gain influence across the organization, and the top executive puzzling over strategy.

Focusing on senior leaders and C-level executives—the leaders whose actions can have the most profound effect on organizational outcomes—and with understanding based on this research, CCL offers apposite analysis of ten specific challenges they face:

FIVE KEY CHALLENGES SENIOR LEADERS FACE

1. Closing credibility gaps: How a leader appears in the eyes of employees, customers, and others closely relates to their effectiveness. Image may seem to be a superficial asset, but it matters. Building credibility as a senior leader involves gaining the trust of stakeholders, enhancing visibility across the organization, and paying attention to image.

2. Enhancing market share and growing sales: While the C-suite executive team will set the strategy, the senior leaders’ challenge is to deliver it. Their prime responsibility is to adapt the strategy to fit the real-world situation as it fluctuates, making refinements to reflect market trends or shifting customer orientation and making strategic shifts to enhance sales growth.

3. Process improvement across groups: Central to successful strategic delivery is the need to develop and establish new processes and systems. Here senior leaders play a vital role fostering innovative improvements and influencing the organization to accept change. For this, they require a strategic outlook, and an agile forward-looking mindset, which takes a broad view outside and beyond the immediate and the local, so that decisions are made taking account of the whole organization and the future.

4. Limited self-awareness: No longer just one of the team, the senior leader can feel isolated, causing them to misread how others perceive them and over- or underestimate their impact. To counter this, it is important leaders develop self-awareness. Consciously looking at oneself objectively and identifying how one is processing information is not only good for one’s own wellbeing and confidence, but helps improve the interpersonal relationships, empathy, approachability, and ability to communicate on which good leadership is built.

5. Transitioning into a new role: Seniority, brought about by a promotion or a career move, involves changes in responsibilities and managing new people or former peers. Adapting to this can be a daunting challenge—often stymied by over confidence, fear of failure, or imposter syndrome. Coaching can be a valuable way to achieve transition readiness. It can enhance self-awareness and sensitivity to interpersonal dynamics. A skilled coach can help close gaps in experience to ensure competence for the job, help extend the networks that will assist in the new role, and assist in recharging basic leadership skills.

FIVE KEY CHALLENGES TOP EXECUTIVES FACE

1. Dynamic business environment: The past knowledge and experience that propelled leaders into C-level positions will not be enough to take them forward. They must find the flexibility to operate in a dynamic business environment. The challenge is to keep on top of ever-changing circumstances—market upheavals, economic uncertainty, disruptive competition, new regulations, and technological advances. Top executives must keep themselves up-to-speed, and crucially develop, acquire and retain the talent needed to support change.

2. Strategic Responsibilities: Developing strategy and communicating a vision is the prime role of the C-level leader. The challenge here is to align strategic priorities across groups and develop teams committed to the vision. This requires creating a leadership strategy—a map that aligns investments in leadership development with the strategy, goals, and aspirations of the business. A further challenge is learning how and when to step in to establish or steer strategy and when to step back to give the team greater autonomy and empowerment to implement that strategy.

3. Interpersonal rigidity: An essential part of the senior executive role is motivating others and generating a commitment to the organization. Authoritarian management styles no longer cut it in a modern organization; instead, successful leadership at C-level depends on building loyalty and trust. Trust is founded on the leader’s integrity, competence, and reliability—but this does not imply rigidity. Rather, it involves agility and the ability to shift approaches to others to maximize influence in different situations and with different stakeholders, to get things done.

4. Organizational readiness amid uncertainty: Preparing for a turbulent but uncertain future is an ongoing challenge for senior executives. Organizations evolve as the outside world changes—the strategic mission will shift, resources may become constrained, technologies will demand new ways of working—and C-level executives must try to foresee these changes and have plans in place for various eventualities. For example, while it is still unclear exactly how generative AI will revolutionize the way we work, leaders need to prepare for it.

5. Lack of cooperation: C-level leadership behaviors that foster a sense of shared ownership, built on interpersonal collaboration and trust, are key to employee engagement and ultimately organizational performance. Collaboration depends on people feeling psychologically safe and free to openly share ideas. It also requires there to be a strong sense of purpose and it needs systems and processes that facilitate teamwork. To influence others toward collaboration, leaders should be energizers who make other people feel as if they matter, help to integrate new talent, and encourage information flow and creativity.

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While CCL offers programs, coaching, and other learning initiatives to support leaders, and would-be leaders, at all levels, it has developed these two world-class programs for senior leaders and C-level leaders:

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Senior Leadership Training: Leading for Organizational Impact

Dates: Brussels: May 12-16; Dec 1-5. Madrid: Sept 1-5. Also available:  Singapore, Greensboro NC, San Diego CA, St. Petersburg FL

Format: 5 days in-person  

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C-Suite Training: Leadership at the Peak

Dates: Saint-Gervais-les-Bains: Dec 8-12. Also available: Colorado Springs CO, Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, Singapore 

Format: 5 days in-person  

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