Even as there has been an increase in leadership program spending across the world in 2015, including in India, the overall capability gap has grown in companies, according to a report.
Deloitte's 2015 Global Human Capital Trends report revealed that many companies treat leadership sporadically, confining development to a select few employees, failing to make long-term investments in leadership and neglect to build a robust pipeline at all levels.
Organisations around the world are struggling to strengthen their leadership pipelines, yet over the past year, businesses fell further behind, particularly in their ability to develop millennial leaders.
"Building leadership remains paramount, ranking as the number two issue in 2015.
"Yet despite the fact that nearly 9 out of 10 respondents surveyed cite the issue as important or very important, the data also suggest that organisations have made little or no progress since last year," the report found.
The study involved surveys and interviews with more than 3,300 business and HR leaders from 106 countries.
Indian companies have also ranked 'learning and development' as a long-term challenge.
Companies rating 'learning and development' as very important tripled since 2014, it said.
"But even as the importance of this issue rose, the readiness to address it went down. Only 40 per cent of respondents rated their organisations as ready or very ready in learning and development in 2015, compared to 75 per cent in 2014," it added.
Culture and engagement is another area that is considered a long-term challenge by companies in India.
In an era of heightened corporate transparency, greater workforce mobility, and severe skills shortages, culture, engagement and retention have emerged as top issues for business leaders, the report stated.
"These issues are not simply an HR problem. Culture and engagement is the most important issue companies face around the world.
"About 87 per cent of organisations cite culture and engagement as one of their top challenges, and 50 per cent call the problem very important," it said.
Organisations that create a culture defined by meaningful work, deep employee engagement, job and organisational fit, and strong leadership are outperforming their peers and will likely beat their competition in attracting top talent, it added.
The report also said that the Human Resource industry in India is highly complex, unorganised and fragmented and is dominated by recruitment, followed by research and outsourcing. Firms providing HR consulting, leadership development and learning services are usually global, dominating the home grown ones.
Few home-grown firms do sell global products under licenses but the one-size-fits-all module often does not help as Indian market is very different from global ones, it added.
