What is the Crucial Skill for Tomorrow's Leaders?

What makes a great leader? What is the fundamental skill you need to be a successful leader? What does it take to be the type of leader that people want to follow not just someone who has a title that would imply they should be a leader?

I have been following the Harvard Business YouTube channel, and they keep serving up great stuff. This is a video from this week that I love. I have studied leadership for a long time and observed many people in "leadership" roles. It amazes me how some people get to a level of organizational leadership (i.e. they have the right title) yet no one wants to follow them. Why not? Lack of trust.

This is a dangerous situation because eventually that lack of trust starts to spread like cancer in the organization. It can spread upward in the organization because there is no action being taken to improve the situation or it can spread down where people start acting on their own because of the lack of leadership.

I am a very firm believer that building relationships by earning trust is a very, very key element to why people want to follow a leader. I would not be successful in my job if I did not have relationships throughout my organization with people who trusted me. It takes time to earn trust with people and it can take an instant to do major damage to that trust. Definitely a crucial skill for tomorrow's leaders. There are lots of pieces to this answer in this video but the first answer is my favorite.

Do you have experience with this? Any good advice for leaders seeking to build trust? Any chance of an untrusted leader turning things around? Would love to hear your stories.

How Would You Respond To: Employees First, Customers Second

Last year I had the chance to attend a week at Harvard. Harvard teaches based on the case study method and one of the main cases we worked on during the week I was there was about HCL Technologies Ltd. in India and Vineet Nayar, thier CEO. I was very intrigued by this case because of the massive change using unconventional methods that he implemented in such a large organization. Vineet has now come out with a book about how he did this.

I came across these two videos. The first video is an overview for the book. The second video is an interview where he talks about the basis for the book and some of the ideas. The concept is to put employees first and customers second, which is contrary to everything you are taught, but his rationally is very interesting. I am becoming more fascinated with companies that take a strong stance on organization communication, transparency of data and culture. Zappos is the most know for this in the US but HCL is a great example of the power of harnessing your most important asset - the people.

What do you think? As an employee or as a customer of that company?