Shane O’Sullivan the Chief Executive of the IMI
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk.
What concerns does the Irish Management Institute have about senior executives?
The Irish Management Institute is worried that senior Irish executives are falling behind their international rivals because they lack some of the leadership attributes needed to drive competitiveness. It also believes that those charged with change management are being increasingly overburdened and with all sorts of responsibilities nowadays and is hosting a conference about leadership attributes this week in Sandiford. Seanna Sullivan is the chief executive of the IM. Am I sitting in front of you? Good morning, Shane. Morning, Joe. You teach a lot about leadership. What is leadership?
Well, for me, it's really about motivating, inspiring people to get behind a common goal and to go after that at scale. That's my own personal belief with all the different spins as to what it means for each one of us.
And it includes a lot of things. We were taught in university it's planning, organising, managing and controlling. But there's also the intangible stuff, isn't there, with leadership? Stuff that you can't put your finger on or describe necessarily.
Absolutely. The self-awareness, the emotional intelligence, the support, the way you help to grow people, the softer skills for sure. I think there's been a lot of focus on those skills in recent years and maybe a little, Joe, to the detriment of the harder skills like managing complex change and education. and innovation. And we're starting to see a little bit of that.
What leadership attributes are essential for competitiveness?
And there are some worrying signals. I think it's important to say, if you look at the skills that we need today to get the job done, they've changed by about 30% over the last 10 years. And the research that I'm seeing says that they'll change by a further 60%. over the coming 10 years. So by any view or any sense, that's a quantum change in the skills that are required.
Now you think or you're worried that Irish managers, Irish senior managers, are falling behind their international rivals when it comes to the competitiveness race. Where are they falling behind especially?
Well, I think on those harder skills, like the applied leadership that's required for innovation and for transformation. And there's a few worrying signals, I must say. If we go back to 2023, May of 23, the OECD said that Ireland is falling behind in terms of digital skills. and in terms of lifelong learning. And it mentioned areas like Scandinavia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, as getting ahead of Ireland. Now, that's a worry. And especially if you look at that from an FDI perspective, those same jurisdictions, and we can add Germany to that, and they're really winning some fantastic mandates over recent years. That's the first signal. I think the second signal, more generally, is the Mario Draghi report from a year ago now, a wonderful report about
Which calls for serious de-red taping of the European Union and some innovation from the bloc as well.
That's exactly what it did. And, you know, just earlier this month, he said that Europe continues to make life hard for itself. And that's one year after the publication of his report.
That's because they've done nothing in that year.
Not a lot. I think in some areas like defence, there have been strides, but more generally, it's a typical European approach where everything is well thought through and time is taken to ponder it. But maybe now the time for action is here because, again, look, it's the talk of the town AI. If you look at what's happening in the US, in China, again in Saudi, again in the UAE, they're taking a different approach. I'm not saying it's the right approach, but certainly they're moving quicker and and they're being more innovative, and there's less of the guardrails.
They're throwing a wall of money at the issue as well. Now, AI is a very important point that you bring up there because surely AI will make life slightly easier for senior managers in leadership roles because, for example, as some AI programs, including Copilot from Microsoft, let the manager go in virtual terms to meetings so they can have a kind of represented at meetings and then get a super synopsis afterwards so he doesn't have to sit through an hour of...
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