Having surveyed happiness with our Richmond Panel we thought that the Global Leadership Forecast 2011, produced by one of our customers, DDI,  may be of interest to you.

Headline Findings:

•    Only 35% of HR professionals believe leadership development quality is high
•    Only 1 in 3 Leaders feel they are getting value from the development they receive
•    Just over 1 in 3 organizations rate leadership quality as very good or excellent
•    Only 1 in 4 HR people rate their leadership as good or excellent
•    Only 18% of HR experts say they have the right leadership for the next 3 - 5 years

The top 5 critical skills for effective leadership are:

•    Driving & managing change
•    Identifying & developing future Talent
•    Fostering creativity & innovation
•    Coaching & developing others
•    Executing organizational strategy

Only half of leaders rate themselves as effective at the 5 most critical skills.

Gary Hamel’s new book “The Future of Management” claims:

“Right now, your company has 21st century internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th century management processes, all built atop 19th century management principles.”

Doubtless Gary is promoting his book but he and the DDI report do offer food for thought.

Report details at:

Full Report

Executive Summary

Details of The Human Resources Forum where DDI will be attending.

For further information please contact Brielle Pope on 212 651 8713

We have talked about workplace happiness and the findings of the Richmond Research Panel.

It is perhaps interesting to look at how different departments perceive workplace happiness over the last 12 months, particularly since many of them are talking about the same organisations.

Less happy are Logistics, then IT and particularly Human Resources. 58% of HR people feel happiness has reduced over the last 12 months.

Communications Directors feel it's about the same.

Finance Directors and Marketing Directors are happier, which is interesting because these two groups usually have opposing opinions.

Surprisingly perhaps, Retail executives are happier still, despite the reported difficulties on the high street.

Happiest of all are our PIMS customers from financial services.

Those potentially closest to the problems of the financial crisis appear to have improved most in terms of happiness over the last 12 months.

We leave you to speculate on the reasons, as ever details of our research are available from David Clark