22 PEOPLE & STRATEGY C-Suite Challenges and the Economic Meltdown: What’s Next for Senior Leaders?

capabilities critical to navigating challenges successfully, both now and in the future. The thinking underlying our approach is out-lined above in Exhibit 1, adapted from Pasmore & Lafferty (2009). According to this model, a leadership strategy aligns an organization’s business strategy with its leadership development efforts by defining the quantities, qualities and collec-tive capabilities of the leadership talent required to execute the business strategy. Logically, a leadership strategy drives the Leadership Development Strategy, which outlines the design and types of leadership development initiatives to be implemented. Leading in a Complex World Since 2003, CCL has aggressively tracked changes in the nature of effective leadership. These appear as changes in kind as well as in complexity. Two criteria were used to define “complexity: ” 1) the challenges were not readily solved using previously successful approaches and strategies; and/or 2) the chal-lenges seemed to evolve or into new, multi-faceted challenges over time. Prior to the recent economic downturn (offi-cially dated December 2007 by the National Bureau of Economic Research), our research showed that flexibility, collaboration, crossing boundaries, and seeing leadership as a process as opposed to a formal position were gaining importance over merely making the numbers as the most critical challenges facing leaders (Martin, 2007). A 2009 CCL study found that organizations identified four skills/capabilities as most important for their leaders in the future: leading people, strategic planning, inspiring commitment, and managing change. Unfortunately, these are among the weakest competencies for today’s leaders (Leslie, 2009). Building on these earlier findings, we focus here on the challenges faced by top executives at the group and enterprise level, includin