Bosses lack people management and leadership skills

A new survey out today reveals the top three skills that bosses and CEOs lack - people management, leadership and communication.

The survey, which examined key training issues facing British businesses, was conducted among 175 training and HR managers, by Video Arts, the award-winning provider of memorably entertaining training.

Martin Addison, Director of Video Arts, said:

Any boss out there would do well to take note of these findings. Being in charge doesn’t mean that your leaderships skills are beyond improvement. In fact, the skills that are required at the head of an organisation can often be very different from those that got you there.

The past decade has seen enormous changes in how most organisations function. Relationships at work have changed. There is far more contact between people from different levels and from different functions in the organisation. These factors put an increasingly high premium on our ability to communicate with one another and underline the importance that bosses develop credible leadership skills in the eyes of employees.

With increased competition in the marketplace, companies need to maintain an edge and it is therefore not surprising that approximately 60 per cent of respondents cited customer service, motivation and leadership as the ’hottest’ training topics for their organisation for this year and the next.


Other key findings from the survey includes:
Surprisingly, only 12% believed that increased pay would be the most effective method of retaining staff, with full marks (perhaps not so
surprisingly) being given to investment in training and coaching (70%) IT is no longer considered a mainstream training topic with only 0.5% of interviewees believing it to be a hot topic this year Best practice and advice from other organisations (35%), online measurement tools (34%) and pre-printed questionnaires (25%) were the top three tools which respondents believed would help them to better measure the success of training provided When asked how the success of their organisation’s training is measured, happy sheets (28%) and staff feedback (25%) both scored highly Some respondents believed that their bosses would greatly benefit from a spell back on the shop floor!

The face-to-face survey was carried out by Video Arts at the annual HRD Conference and Exhibition in April 2004. Video Arts is keen to better understand changing training needs among today’s diverse workforce and the evolving issues companies face. The survey is part of its ongoing work that enables it to continue to provide engaging and entertaining training on topics that businesses really need.

For more information on Video Arts and their programmes, please visit