Global CEO insights on Key Leadership Qualities and Key Dimensions to Focus on

IBM recently completed a study with the largest known sample of one-on-one CEO interviews - over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries polled on what drives them in managing their organisations in today's world.

Two significant questions - 'What are the most important leadership qualities over the next five years?' and 'What are the key dimensions to focus on over the next five years?' both provided answers that align with key capabilty areas for FranklinCovey.

On the question of 'Leadership Qualities' the two identified as the most important (with agreement by 60% and 52% of the sample respectively) were 'Creativity' and 'Integrity'.

• Creativity - In FranklinCovey's work we foster creativity at the individual, team, organisational and market level through habits of proactivity, cultures built on 'win-win' thinking and synergy, ways of working that allow front line staff to be engaged in the execution of high level goals and systems that measure and foster 'delight' in our customers such that they are happy to invest their time in co-creating with us solutions to better meet their needs
• Integrity - The 'character ethic' and 'principle centred leadership' has been at the heart of FranklinCovey's work for over 20 years and more recently our thinking on the Speed of Trust has transformed the way many senior leaders view Trust as an operating system for their business. (As one CEO of a $5billion organisation described it "(Speed of Trust) is the best training programme I've seen - it's not a training programme, in fact its a process of managing. It's the only programme I've seen that spans all of the functions - I think its a natural way to run an organisation and its the most exciting change in the culture that I've seen in my 28 years (in the business)"

On the question of 'key dimensions to focus on over the next 5 years' the two identified as the most important (with agreement by 88% and 81% of the sample respectively) were 'Getting closer to the customer' and 'People skills'

• Getting closer to the customer - FranklinCovey's Helping Clients Succeed adopts a completely different philosophy in the way it enables organisations to develop relationships with their customers - moving away from the dysfunction of doing something 'to' clients and instead emphasing the 'intent' to help them succeed, it has been named as one of the top global sales methodologies for the past 3 years running. In addition to this, FranklinCovey's Loyalty Practice works in partnership with Fred Reicheld, author of the Ultimate Question and 'father' of the modern day Customer Loyalty thinking, to create communities of customers that are happy to recommend their experience to others.
• People skills - FranklinCovey works with tens of thousands people every year, identifying the ways of thinking and ways of working that are characteristic of top performers and creating programmes of learning and application so that they can become scalable to the majority.