Challenges for Leaders Will Multiply, Intensify

"The current challenges confronting leaders will only multiply and intensify," said Stephen Parker, Chief Commercial Officer of Healthy Companies, which for 20 years has maintained a continuing dialogue with 250 CEOs in 40 countries. "Our research indicates widespread uncertainty about the future as well as mutual mistrust at all levels of the organization."

Healthy Companies identified ten trends that it believes are combining to create an adverse environment for corporate leadership:

1. VOLATILE MARKETS: With increasing unpredictability in market conditions, CEOs must develop a greater capacity to survive and thrive in chaos and stop tying so many resources to prediction and control. 
2. WARY CONSUMERS: With organic growth threatened by reduced consumer confidence and restricted credit, CEOs must reinvigorate their companies by getting back to business basics and focusing on execution. 
3. CYNICAL PUBLIC: Because the lingering anger from the recession naturally focuses on the "haves," a group in which most top executives fit, CEOs must work hard to rebuild trust, even if they feel they were not to blame.
4. DIMINISHED LOYALTY: With institutions floundering and short term rewards illusory, CEOs must respond to people's yearning for organizations that are both sustainable and in service of a clear and compelling higher purpose.
5. GLOBAL COMPETITION: With increasingly fierce global competition for reputation, customers, money and talent, CEOs must make their organizations distinctive--with a compelling customer and employee brand--while creating growth, innovation, differentiation and superior performance. 
6. ESCALATING COSTS: Due to rising human capital costs and greater emphasis on the health of people and companies, CEOs must understand and manage all the levers that create healthy companies, not just the cost side. 
7. FEAR OF THE FUTURE: Because people have lost their collective confidence in top leaders and businesses, especially in the United States, CEOs must find platforms to speak and act pragmatically while creating a convincing vision of a better future.
8. PUBLIC SCRUTINY: With increased board and regulator accountability, as well as intense media exposure, CEOs must make collaboration, win-win partnerships and stakeholder balance a part of the everyday DNA of their organizations.
9. INSTANTANEOUS GLOBAL COMMUNICATION: With hydra-like electronic blogs and social networks making it possible for news--good, bad or fabricated--to go global in a matter of minutes, CEOs must be impeccably authentic, globally literate and facile with the new rules of social media.
10. LIMITED NATURAL RESOURCES: With greater public awareness of diminishing natural resources and the impact of business on the environment, CEOs must visibly deploy strategies to earn their credibility in a greener world.

According to Parker, many CEOs are reluctant to acknowledge the extent of the challenges they face. "There's still a great deal of business as usual. It may be that some corporate leaders just plan to pass the problems along to their successors."

For leaders intent on addressing these challenge Parker said a priority needs to be put on rebuilding trust. "It's ironic, but it's today's CEOs who have to clean up problems not of their own creation."