When contemplating the most impactful roles in society, those that profoundly affect human well-being and development, parenting and leadership stand out.

Despite their significance, these pivotal responsibilities surprisingly lack mandatory training, certification, or standard requirements.

While it's true that today there are numerous resources and classes available to assist new parents (although, let’s be honest, no class can fully prepare you for such a monumental life change), and some organizations are offering leadership training to managers, these efforts are often fragmented and inconsistent. However, I'm not here to discuss parenting. Instead, I'd like to shift our attention to leadership.

‍Unlike numerous professions, management and leadership lack clear minimum requirements and universally recognized standards for modern leadership.

The barista at your local coffee shop gets more training than most leaders. Why? Because coffee connoisseurs know that there’s an art to making a great cappuccino. No one is going to put a brand-new employee behind the coffee counter to fail.  

In nearly every industry I've consulted in, individuals are frequently promoted into management and executive roles without the requisite training or essential skills for effective leadership. This often stems from inadequate preparation by organizations, which fail to consider the qualities, competencies, and skills necessary for success in these positions.

In addition, the requirements for success in management have evolved over the past few decades, yet many leaders have not updated their leadership styles and still rely on outdated practices. This has resulted in an increase in the number of poorly trained, ineffective managers who struggle to engage their teams and often contribute to a toxic work culture.

These widespread issues highlight the importance of identifying and nurturing true leadership potential. Promoting individuals ill-equipped for leadership roles leads to disengaged employees and the erosion of company culture.

Here are five truths that we must embrace if we are going to elevate our leaders and organizations to thrive:  

Not everyone is meant to be a leader.  

Just like not everyone is meant to be a pilot, a teacher, an artist, a chef, or a barista.  

You wouldn’t think of getting on a plane if the pilot didn’t have a license. You wouldn’t go to a health practitioner with no training, experience, or medical degree. And you’d stop going to a local coffee shop that didn’t train their baristas in the art of coffee making.

These respected professions have specific requirements for success. It's time we started treating leadership as a respected profession, one that requires specific standards and prerequisites for advancement.

We need a leadership revolution.

Leadership is a privilege, and a huge responsibility.

Leading in today's environment is more challenging than ever before. The skills, competencies, and qualities required for successful leadership have evolved significantly in the past several decades.

Effective leaders must now provide clarity for their teams, prioritize key results, nurture organizational culture, facilitate difficult conversations, coach and develop employees, manage in hybrid and virtual settings, and navigate a rapidly changing world where change is constant.

While past managers could succeed with a transactional, bureaucratic, results-oriented approach, today's leaders must focus on positive influence, emphasizing well-being, care, and connections, all while achieving results. This demands advanced empathy, flexibility, and emotional intelligence skills.

Managers and executives must adeptly tailor their leadership style to influence individuals possessing diverse personalities, backgrounds, values, generations, and thinking patterns.

Creating a modern culture is essential to staying relevant and thriving in today’s complex world.

The way we create modern cultures is ensuring our managers are employing modern leadership practices. This requires training people before they move into a leadership role.

Many managers and executives are defaulting to an old operating style and have not upgraded their leadership skills to stay relevant with the times. By promoting people into leadership positions without the necessary skills, organizations leave their biggest asset—their people—at the mercy of inexperienced and undertrained leaders who contribute to disengagement and lower productivity. When supervisors, managers, and executives haven’t been trained in modern leadership skills, they tend to manage how they were managed—the traditional approach of fixing, directing, micromanaging, and controlling.

According to Gallup’s most recent research, only 33% of employees in the United States are engaged at work, meaning only one-third of employees bring their full effort to work each day. Mediocre leadership not only leads to lower engagement, productivity, and job satisfaction, but it also impacts customer service.

There is a huge opportunity for organizations to elevate employee engagement and wellbeing, which will elevate the service customers experience from the organization.  

The way we elevate our cultures is by elevating our leaders.

The direct manager has the biggest impact on how your employees experience work. Certainly, the executive level sets the tone—but if your middle level managers don’t know how to engage employees in a tangible way, your culture will deteriorate.

Promotion to leadership should not be a reward for hard work.  

We need to stop promoting for technical expertise and instead promote for leadership qualities, competencies, and skills, and this starts with every single leader.  

We need to support our managers and set them up for success instead of setting them up to fail. Each management position should have specific competencies identified for success. While not all leadership positions are alike, standard competencies like empathy, people-focus, and emotional intelligence skills should be minimum requirements for entry.

Every single person who manages another human being should be required to complete leadership training before they become a supervisor.

There’s a lot of advice around how to manage up—how to effectively manage your boss. This is very valuable, and the skills for managing the relationship with your boss are important. But it is not an employee’s job to manage a toxic boss.  

We also need to give employees a peek behind the curtain of what leadership really entails before they commit to managing people. We need to make it okay to opt out of leadership.  

Cultural health must be a strategic priority.  

Most organizations don’t take a strategic approach to elevating the leadership quality in their organizations. The strategic method requires taking an intentional approach - assessing the talent of every employee, determining who is in the right role and who is not - and taking decisive action. This action could involve coaching, training, teaching, or, in some cases, termination.  

In addition, organizations need to purposefully develop high potential employees for leadership roles.

As leaders, it is our responsibility to nurture the organizational culture.

If someone is underperforming, regardless of their tenure or likability, we must not ignore or circumvent the issue. Instead, we must address the root cause.  

Imagine if each of us focused on elevating our leadership and our organizational cultures. We would elevate our industries and position our organizations to not only survive, but THRIVE.  

You have the power to create that. I hope you will join me in a leadership revolution to elevate your team, elevate your culture, and to elevate leadership.

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Build more confidence at The Confidence Masterclass on Thursday, August 8th @ 1pm ET so you're ready to boldly lead the charge in the leadership revolution.