There is no shortage of tools and frameworks available for analysing the leadership skills gap in your organisation.

But a leadership skills gap – like so many people challenges – can take many different forms. In this post, we look at three examples that offer some insights and ideas for tackling the leadership skills gap at an individual and organisational level.

What is a leadership skills gap?

For individual managers and leaders, there will be situations where their skills fall short of what a particular task or challenge requires. There is a gap between what they can do and what needs doing.

For organisations, a leadership skills gap refers to the inadequate, missing or under-represented skills on the senior leadership team as a group.

A leadership skills gap analysis can help both individuals and organisations to identify these skills gaps and create an action plan for addressing them.

Balancing left and right brain leadership skills

Our first leadership skills gap example comes from Accenture, the consulting firm.

Their recent study, “Whole Brain Leadership“, revealed a strong correlation between leadership teams that displayed both left and right brain thinking and improved business performance.

Revenue growth was 22 per cent higher and profitability was 34 per cent higher when leaders were “adroit at both the ‘art’ of people and ‘science’ of business”, the study said.

The study went on to warn that leaders and leadership teams that failed to balance the two would be ill-equipped to deal with an increasingly important and influential group of staff and consumers it dubbed “Pathfinders”.

Pathfinders are motivated by what benefits wider society and believe they have the power to change companies. By leveraging social media, Pathfinders expect C-suite leaders to display both left and right brain skills in their leadership style.

“That style balances traditional, left-directed skills that draw on data and analytics with non-traditional, right-directed skills that focus on human-centered capabilities such as empathy, self-awareness and intuition,” the study concluded.

The skills and gaps of seven leadership archetypes

Lolly Daskel, a leadership coach and best-selling author, has identified seven leadership archetypes and seven leadership skills gaps.

In her recently published book, “The Leadership Gap“, she seeks to help individuals and organisations understand the leadership styles and types of leadership gaps that undermine performance.

Unlike previous leadership frameworks, Daskel argues that leaders will display both positive and negative attributes of different archetypes in different situations.

She believes that it comes down to individuals – with the help of internal or external coaches and mentors – focussing on themselves rather than other people or their circumstances.

“The seven archetypes have seven virtues,” Daskel explained in an interview with Entrepreneur.com. “These virtues are within us and at any given moment, depending on the situation, we must choose who we want to be in that circumstance because it has a bearing on our decisions and choices.”

Daskel’s seven archetypes form the acronym “RETHINK”. They are: The Rebel, the Explorer, the Truth Teller, the Hero, the Inventor, the Navigator and the Knight. A summary of the virtues and gaps of each archetype are available on the book’s website.

Diversity and the leadership skills gap

Arguably the most significant leadership skills gap most organisations face comes from their failure to properly leverage the talent of women.

Despite the focus on this issue, women are still under-represented at board level in leading economies.

For example, only 12 companies in the ASX200 have a woman CEO and more than half have no women on their executive leadership teams, according to the latest Chief Executive Women (CEW) census.

Such a visible lack of diversity raises questions about the mix of skills at the top level of the country’s largest organisations.

A recent study by KPMG, the accounting firm, revealed that women who do make it into senior leadership positions felt they had to adjust their style and behaviour to be accepted.

More than half (58 per cent) of women responding to the survey said they had changed how they operated at work following feedback that they were “too bossy or demanding”, “not aggressive enough”, “not collaborative enough” or “too direct”.

Gender diversity is a big opportunity for Australian businesses. Accenture’s Whole Brain Leadership study showed how an important segment of both employees and consumers were demanding more from their leaders.

They expect them to exhibit a broader set of skills, but they will also expect them to better represent the people they’re trying to hire and sell to. Better gender diversity will be a huge part of that.