The Self-Disruptive Leader

To ensure organizations succeed in a rapidly changing business world, a new kind of future-ready leader must take priority. Current models of leadership go some way to answering this, but research by the Korn Ferry Institute reveals the ideal leader for today’s disruptive business environment: the self-disruptive leader.

This new model of a high-performing leader incorporates and builds on existing concepts of agile, digital and inclusive leadership, but also highlights the importance of leaders who are experts in the creation of opportunity and the capitalization of the flow of knowledge. In this model, the new source of competitive advantage is a leader who can connect resources and people adeptly to build an innovative ecosystem. This enables them to bring robust ideas to market at a rapid pace and, crucially, to adapt quickly to change by disrupting themselves again and again.

This study reveals the skills that leaders will need in the future of business — and in today’s increasingly disruptive environment. We uncover how many leaders are performing highly in these areas as well as where there’s a pressing need for improvement. By analyzing the leadership profiles of 150,000 executives from the Korn Ferry Institute’s proprietary data, the study underlines the five key qualities of effective, future-focused leadership — qualities which correlate with a country’s ability to innovate and which correlate with a company’s likelihood of being an acclaimed brand. It also reveals how well leaders in 18 key global markets are performing in each dimension, and where improvement is urgently needed.

Additionally, the study uses opinion research from 795 investors and analysts to model the gap between the current supply of these high-performance behaviors and the market’s demand for them, revealing just how wide leadership skills shortages are globally and by market.