Less than one in ten Irish business leaders report being experts in strategic areas including innovation and change management.
The findings of the Irish Management Institute's white paper highlights concerns that strategic leadership gaps that could undermine Ireland's competitive edge globally.
IMI CEO Shane O'Sullivan described the white paper as "a wake-up call for organisations across Ireland."
Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, he said job skills have changed dramatically over the past decade by about 30% and that is going to increase over the next ten years.
"We undertook the research to understand how Irish leaders are placed," said Mr O'Sullivan.
"They're placed very well when it comes to personal leadership skills, like emotional intelligence, the principles of leadership, working with teams, understanding what they need to do, they score very highly and are very confident", he said.
"But the worrying aspect is when it comes to elements like strategic thinking, innovation, and complex change execution, the confidence levels are very worrying, they're down at one in ten levels of confidence in ability to work through those challenging skills and capabilities, and they are at the core of Irish competitiveness," he added.
The research highlights concerns that immediate pressures such as market volatility, tariffs and rising costs are distracting organisations from developing the more complex skills in their leaders.
Mr O'Sullivan said he is consistently hearing from senior leaders that they are overwhelmed with the volume of work, and the expectation to be experts in areas such as technology and geopolitical challenges on top of "getting the day job done."
"It's a tough reality, but somehow we've got to find a way to step back and look longer term," he said, "from a report I read recently, four out of ten CEOs believe that if their companies don't change in a very dramatic way over the next 10 years, they're not going to survive".
"That's the reality and we need to step back from all of those very real challenges and actually plot a future where our companies and our competitiveness are sustainable," advised Mr O'Sullivan.
The IMI CEO said it worries him that there are not any sectors that are jumping out at him where Ireland could be innovation leaders.
However he acknowledged there is a huge amount of innovation in the country referencing some of the speakers at the IMI National Leadership Conference today.
"We have Donald Slattery, the former Avolon CEO, the guru in terms of entrepreneurship and innovation, Jenny Melia, the new CEO of Enterprise Ireland, Joe Heneghan, who is a real disruptor in his role at Revolut, and Emma Redmond, the chief of OpenAI," he said.
"We need to be talking and listening to people like this who have found a path, who have actually managed to stand back and actually affect change in a really positive and a really interesting way," he added.
