Illustration by Jessamyn Rubio

September 1, 2009 | In challenging times, top organizational leaders are under intense scrutiny, their beliefs, skills and actions watched closely by all. Yet little attention is generally paid to mid-level leaders -- even though their beliefs about strategic priorities and challenges can have a tremendous impact on an organization’s success or failure.

At Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, we have found that while senior and mid-level leaders generally agree about key challenges and important leadership skills, they also disagree in important ways that reflect their different organizational vantage points. Identifying and understanding those disagreements -- and the differing perspectives that underlie them -- can be a powerful tool to help clarify priorities and make sure organizational initiatives are understood and agreed upon by leaders at all levels.

In the Duke Executive Leadership Survey, conducted in fall 2008 by the Fuqua/Coach K Center on Leadership & Ethics, we asked 205 executives -- both senior and mid-level leaders -- about various leadership issues. Among other things, we asked them to identify the top leadership challenges facing their organizations and to rate the importance of 29 leadership skills for senior executives in their organizations.

That first question, we hoped, would uncover potentially divergent views among senior and mid-level leaders about strategic priorities. The second question was intended to help us understand how differing attitudes about the importance of various leadership skills affect which skills are emphasized in the development of organizational leaders.

Here’s what we found.

What are the top leadership challenges facing the organization?

Senior and mid-level leaders named many of the same issues as the biggest challenges facing their organizations. But they ranked those issues differently, and, in many instances, differed substantially in the percentage of respondents who considered an issue important.

Senior leaders identified increasing innovation, leading internal organizational growth and access to capital as the biggest challenges. By contrast, mid-level leaders named improving overall quality of their organization’s leadership, developing the next generation of leaders and increasing employee commitment/retention as top concerns.

Top leadership challenges

Rankings are based on the percent of executives listing the challenge in their Top 5; these percentages are shown in parenthesis.

Why the difference? The concern of senior leaders with innovation, growth and access to capital appears to reflect an external, or market-driven, view of organizational success. The top concerns identified by mid-level leaders, on the other hand -- quality of the organization’s leadership, developing the next generation of leaders, and increasing employee commitment -- are all inwardly focused, likely reflecting a more internal perspective on success.

Given the typical roles of senior and mid-level leaders, these alternate perspectives are not surprising. Even so, organizational leaders should make sure that these differing perspectives and the unspoken assumptions that underlie them are brought to the surface and discussed. In that way, they can help reduce the risk that leaders unknowingly disagree about organizational priorities -- one of the most common ways organizations undermine their own success.