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most significant capabilities challenge. Leaders today sometimes appear to
be an endangered species. The second most important capacity building
challenge facing organizations in this study was fostering a culture that
supports learning and development. Clearly, these two key challenges are

closely related.

Leadership, like the inner workings of a computer, is a complex set of
relationships, systems, and processes that few fully master. Dave Ulrich,
Global Consulting Alliance.

Organizational life today is often a complex social environment of

confrontation, miscommunication, manipulation, hostility, and conflict.
Does that sound like an exaggeration to you? If so, take a good look at
most organizations. So much of what takes place in virtually all
organizations is grounded in the interrelationships of its members, and all
human relationships have problems. These interactions involve the work

that is done, the goals that are set, and the decisions that are made. Without
effective leadership, members of an organization often quickly degenerate
into argument and conflict, because they each see things in different ways
and lean toward different solutions.

The core of the criticism of organizations in a lot of the literature is that all

sorts of them (corporations, government agencies, and not-for-profit
organizations) tend to be over-managed and under-led. Those
organizations suffering from over-management tend to be slow to make
necessary changes and therefore achieve less than what they could. In the
organizations that are characterized by poor leadership, employees see

very little that is positive. In a climate of distrust, employees learn that so-
called leaders will act in ways that are not easily understood or that do not
seem to be in the organization’s best interests. Poor leadership leads to an
abandonment of hope, which, if allowed to go on for too long, results in an
organization becoming completely dysfunctional. The organization must
then deal with the practical impact of unpleasant change, but more
importantly, must labor under the burden of employees who have given

up, and have no faith in the system or in the ability of leaders to turn the

David Kolzow 6