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Latin America Region

LATAM Companies Seek New Brand of Leadership

LATAM economies have been under a lot of stress during the last year. The social riots in countries like Colombia, Venezuela, Perú and Chile, plus the quarantines due to the COVID-19 pandemic have had a strong impact on each country’s local economy.

S&P lowered its 2020 GDP forecast for Latin America by just over 2 percentage points to a contraction of roughly 7.5%. The expected growth is about a 4%.

Economies with stronger policy support, such as Chile and Peru are expected to have smaller permanent GDP losses than those where support has been limited or ineffective.

A year of definitions

In recent months, we have seen that the foregoing has become especially evident in areas such as retail, mass consumption, luxury goods, technology-related services, air transport, gastronomy and hotels.

According to the analysis of the ESE Business School in Chile, the new leadership teams must know the values, needs and emotions of society, understand fortuitous disruptions, inspire, listen and trust their teams. But there is something else: they need to have the attributes of someone who wants to promote new ideas in which he or she believes, a person with great initiative, strong motivation and need to succeed; that is, the traits of an entrepreneur.

‘Tell me the innovation you want and I will tell you the manager you are looking for”. That phrase sums up the challenge of what kind of leader companies require to maintain an innovative momentum.

In fact, the results of the 2020 Most Innovative Companies Ranking reveals that ‘successful, advanced innovation companies have transformational leaders and those without them perform poorly. It’s not that they don’t have any results, because any large company manager is good, but he’s not up to the challenge. ‘

What does the new leader require?

We conducted a survey of directors, CEOs and front-line managers of local and multinational organizations and 65% of those surveyed stated that this new scenario has demonstrated new types of leadership in organizations.  Most interesting is that adaptability, the ability to communicate effectively and the ability to make decisions were the skills most characteristic of these new leaders.

The speed of change is going to increase. And the need for adaptation will be fundamental and will require leaders who are able to grow and learn continuously. This requires curiosity, market vision, the ability to motivate others and connect others to accompany you in this transformation; resilience and determination to push and overcome all obstacles.