Developing Leaders
For most organizations leadership development is a neglected art. Many think that leadership development is what happens when you send your leaders to a seminar or workshop, hoping they come back with a new perspective. We’re not against workshops (in fact, we lead many of them), but that’s not the essence of leadership development. Here is a simple but effective approach to developing the leaders in your organization.
————————————————————
1. Develop yourself as a leader
Assess your own leadership abilities. Are you leading well? What would your staff say about your leadership? This introspection is often overlooked but essential to the leadership development process. Studies of children, employees, military officers, and middle managers all point to the fact that it takes great leaders to produce great leaders. If you have significant leadership responsibilities make sure you reading and studying about leadership consistently. About 1% of leaders are naturals that simply get leadership intuitively. The rest of us need to keep developing ourselves as leaders.
2. Understand the cost (and reward) of developing Leaders
Like most things worth doing, developing leaders takes time, talent, and treasure. It takes more than most people realize. We estimate that to do a respectable job of leadership development you will need to allocate 2-4 hours per week, per person. Without an organizational value committed to leadership development you won’t find this sort of time. However, in an organization committed to leadership development this time will be gold. In addition, a thoughtful plan will include specific training, coaching, and other resources that will cause the organization to make a financial commitment to the process.
The reward side of the equation looks like this: great leaders are capable of building organizations and getting results that less developed leaders can only dream of.
3. Choose a model that works for your organization
It is essential to have an understandable, easy to communicate, clear, and simple model of leadership. It also needs to fit on one piece of paper. No one can remember the organization’s 18 principles on leadership. But any leader can remember the 3-5 essentials of the organization’s leadership philosophy.
At Kanon Clarity and our portfolio companies we use the Leadership Challenge by Kouzes and Posner. The Leadership Challenge offers a research-based approach that was developed into the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership:
- Model the Way
- Inspire a Shared Vision
- Challenge the Process
- Enable Others to Act
- Encourage the Heart
Kanon Clarity is a distributor of the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) which we use to evaluate how consistently our clients are implementing the Five Practices.
4. Be consistent in your efforts
An average leadership development plan consistently executed will trump even a perfect plan that is inconsistently executed. READ THAT SENTENCE AGAIN!
The number one leadership development issue that we see in most organizations is that it takes place in fits and starts. An effort is born out of frustration that causes the organization to go on a leadership development kick. After a flurry of meetings, new slogans, and a workshop or two, the activity dies down until a new frustration inspires a new effort.
Becoming a great leader is about learning good leadership practices, but the practices need to be learned consistently and patiently with a view toward the long term.
5. Create high expectations and hold people to high, but obtainable standards
Most people will rise to the level of expectation set by their leader. This is especially true if their leader is worth following. And it is even more true when we are developing leaders. Leaders look for challenges and look forward to meeting them. Leaders desire to be held accountable and want to be called out when they haven’t met the challenge so they can correct their course.
6. Balance challenge and praise
Many leaders struggle to balance challenge and praise. They are either overly gracious (where people get praise regardless of their results) and challenge people too little, or they are constantly challenging people and forget to express true appreciation when people meet the challenges. Balancing challenge and praise means truly appreciating people’s hard work and good leadership when they exhibit it AND challenging them to reach new levels on a consistent basis.
7. Give opportunities to succeed, understanding that failure is part of the process
Leaders struggle with letting go. However, the essence of leadership development is allowing others to step up and take leadership under your guidance. Their success will only come when given the chance to take the ball and run with it. On the flip side, failures are likely along the way. Developing leaders need to experience both success and failure so that they can handle either one well.
8. In the end, the most highly effective leaders have been mentored
In our day, the master-apprentice relationship has been largely lost in in most disciplines. Leadership Development is no exception. Modern leadership development practices are often based on the employer/employee relationship which is command and control based. However, the most effective path to excellent leadership is to have a mentoring relationship with an excellent leader. These relationships take on the nature of “being with in order to become like”. From a technical perspective, mentoring is inefficient: more is learned while observing and discussing than by educating alone. However, effectiveness can’t be measured by efficiency. The product of mentoring is highly effective leaders. With highly effective leaders everyone wins.
————————————————————
This list is not comprehensive (there is no comprehensive leadership development list). However, consistently applied, these principles will help you take large steps in growing your leadership development talent.