Interpersonal Communication Skills Highlights 2023 DDI Global Leadership Forecast

Every year DDI publishes their Global Leadership Forecast, the largest study of its kind, aimed at understanding current and future leadership best practices. This year’s forecast highlights interpersonal communication as a top leadership skill for attracting and retaining top talent.

This year’s survey included data from:

• 13,695 leaders
• 1,827 HR professionals
• 1,556 organizations

Download the Global Leadership Forecast

The Big Takeaways

• Leaders are exhausted by constant change
• They have little tolerance for poor leadership

Leaders are looking for work cultures where trust runs fluently up and down the leadership ranks.

What Keeps CEOS Up At Night?

• Attracting and retaining top talent
• Developing the next generation of leaders
• Maintaining an engaged workforce

Top talent is 3.5X more likely to leave when they perceive leaders as having ineffective interpersonal skills. 

Are you assessing and developing leadership communication skills?

Trust Starts at The Top: Top 7 Trust-Building Behaviors

• Listen and respond with empathy.
• Provide opportunities for growth and development.
• Share thoughts and rationale for decisions.
• Genuinely acknowledge your own failures.
• Inquire and care about employee wellbeing.
• Encourage others to challenge old ways of doing things.
• Recognize the success of team members.

Are you investing in Compassionate Accountability skills for your leaders?

Burnout Is Linked To Quality of Leadership

• 72% of leaders report feeling used up at the end of the day, an increase of 12% from 2020.
• Empathy is the most frequently identified quality of a top leader.
• Finding purpose helps people stay engaged and stay with their company. Leaders play a huge role in this.

Organizations that invest in high-quality leadership are 3.4X more likely to be rated as a best place to work

Are you training leaders in empathy skills?

Coaching Boosts Engagement IF Leaders Are Skilled at Coaching

• Leaders who get quality coaching from their managers are more likely to feel engaged, accountable, and want to stick around.
• This supports accumulating research that job satisfaction is closely linked to the quality of the employee-manager relationship.

Are you helping your leaders become better coaches?

Investing in Leadership Skills Pays Off

• Companies that focus on critical leadership skills outperform their counterparts in the critical areas of engagement, retention and change resilience.
• These same companies are 1.4X more likely to be named best places to work, which improves their ability to attract and retain top talent.
• Companies that create cohesive leadership cultures perform better financially than those who don’t.

In companies where managers are effective at interpersonal skills, high-potential employees were 3.3X less likely to want to leave their company within a year.

Want a Stronger Brand? Invest In Leadership.

Here’s the bottom line:

• Brand is a lagging indicator of the quality of your culture.
• Culture is the sum of all the interactions between your people, your stakeholders and customers.
• Leadership defines and role-models the daily interactions that create the culture that drives the brand.

By investing in your leaders’ interpersonal competencies, you will make a difference in the quality of your culture and the quality of your brand. This will help you attract and retain top talent and increase engagement and productivity.

Copyright Next Element Consulting, LLC 2023