Leadership 2.0: The Requisite Leadership Competencies and Potential for an Effective Leader

Mark Bridges
5 min readJan 22, 2019

--

The use of behavioral competencies in appraising the skills and potential of leaders is a norm in organizations large and small. The competency models are omnipresent owing to several reasons — a shared vocabulary to convey the expectations from people, a basis for Performance Management planning, and a means to express the parameters for career advancement. However, problems surface when competencies are considered the only factor in evaluating the leaders’ potential.

There are few limitations that bring criticism for the utilization of competency models in assessing leaders’ potential. These include their extensive reliance on past behaviors rather than future potential — where relevant experience is deemed a critical element in establishing a leader’s competence — complexity of execution, and clash of behavioral traits required under various competencies with one another. These shortcomings and complexities warrant a different approach to assess the leadership potential of executives.

The Leadership Competency Model is a newer, more robust competency assessment framework that not only evaluates the skills and abilities of leaders, but also examines their potential based on psychometric data of global leaders, neuropsychological research, and past studies on successful managers.

The Leadership Competency Model is comprised of 2 distinct elements:

  1. Leadership Competencies
  2. Leadership Potential

First, let’s take a look at the Leadership Competencies.

Leadership Competencies

The Leadership Competencies are learned factors which are attained, developed, change over time, and indicate what a leader is capable of doing. The leadership competency model encompasses 4 leadership competencies (each of which is further comprised of 2 Core Competencies):

  1. People Leadership
  2. Relationship Leadership
  3. Business Leadership
  4. Entrepreneurial leadership

People Leadership

The People Leadership competency involves 2 core competencies:

  • Inspirational Leadership: That entails establishing leadership impact by projecting confidence, expertise, and authority to energize and motivate people to support you.
  • Execution: Entails driving execution and achieving results through other people by tracking team performance, building and aligning capabilities, and motivating teams.

Relationship Leadership

Relationship leaders develop knowledge and skills to inspire people and develop strategic relationships. The Relationship Leadership competency involves 2 core competencies:

  • Influence: Entails influencing people with varying perspectives and interests using interpersonal persuasion approaches, and getting their agreement to support key endeavors.
  • Collaboration: Entails creating an ecosystem of team work, by generating support from people across the enterprise, and recognizing and capturing synergies internally and externally.

Business Leadership

At the top maturity level of Business Leadership, leaders develop competencies to set future vision and make decisions that deliver shareholder value. The Business Leadership competency involves 2 core competencies:

  • Direction: Entails setting clear direction and priorities for cross-functional teams, creating a shared purpose and objective, and keeping teams focused on one vision.
  • Business Judgment: Entails making decisions related to effective resource utilization and maximizing commercial return.

Entrepreneurial Leadership

At the top maturity level for entrepreneurial leadership, leaders champion innovation and build and sustain enterprise capabilities. The Entrepreneurial Leadership competency involves 2 core competencies:

  • Competitive Edge: Entails driving change by improving existing practices, inspiring new ideas, and creating an ecosystem for people to innovate.
  • Building Talent: Entails building abilities to gain competitive advantage by developing the team and providing opportunities for diverse high performers to grow.

The second part of the Leadership Competency Model framework provides the dimensions of Leadership Potential.

Leadership Potential

These are hardwired or inherent factors which are hard to develop, stable over time and indicate how the person is. The Leadership Potential has 4 major components:

  1. Change Potential
  2. Intellectual Potential
  3. People Potential
  4. Motivational Potential

Are you interested in understanding more about the 4 Leadership Potentials? To learn more about developing the Leadership Potential as well as Leadership Competencies, you can download a detailed editable PowerPoint on the Leadership Competency Model here on the Flevy documents marketplace.

Do You Find Value in This Framework?

You can download in-depth presentations on this and hundreds of similar business frameworks from the FlevyPro Library. FlevyPro is trusted and utilized by 1000s of management consultants and corporate executives. Here’s what some have to say:

“My FlevyPro subscription provides me with the most popular frameworks and decks in demand in today’s market. They not only augment my existing consulting and coaching offerings and delivery, but also keep me abreast of the latest trends, inspire new products and service offerings for my practice, and educate me in a fraction of the time and money of other solutions. I strongly recommend FlevyPro to any consultant serious about success.”

– Bill Branson, Founder at Strategic Business Architects

“As a niche strategic consulting firm, Flevy and FlevyPro frameworks and documents are an on-going reference to help us structure our findings and recommendations to our clients as well as improve their clarity, strength, and visual power. For us, it is an invaluable resource to increase our impact and value.”

– David Coloma, Consulting Area Manager at Cynertia Consulting

“As a small business owner, the resource material available from FlevyPro has proven to be invaluable. The ability to search for material on demand based our project events and client requirements was great for me and proved very beneficial to my clients. Importantly, being able to easily edit and tailor the material for specific purposes helped us to make presentations, knowledge sharing, and toolkit development, which formed part of the overall program collateral. While FlevyPro contains resource material that any consultancy, project or delivery firm must have, it is an essential part of a small firm or independent consultant’s toolbox.”

– Michael Duff, Managing Director at Change Strategy (UK)

“FlevyPro has been a brilliant resource for me, as an independent growth consultant, to access a vast knowledge bank of presentations to support my work with clients. In terms of RoI, the value I received from the very first presentation I downloaded paid for my subscription many times over! The quality of the decks available allows me to punch way above my weight — it’s like having the resources of a Big 4 consultancy at your fingertips at a microscopic fraction of the overhead.”

– Roderick Cameron, Founding Partner at SGFE Ltd

“Several times a month, I browse FlevyPro for presentations relevant to the job challenge I have (I am a consultant). When the subject requires it, I explore further and buy from the Flevy Marketplace. On all occasions, I read them, analyze them. I take the most relevant and applicable ideas for my work; and, of course, all this translates to my and my clients’ benefits.”

– Omar Hernán Montes Parra, CEO at Quantum SFE

--

--

Mark Bridges
Mark Bridges

Written by Mark Bridges

I blog about various management frameworks, from Strategic Planning to Digital Transformation to Change Management. https://flevy.com

No responses yet