Seven Ways to Improve the Results of Your Leadership Development Efforts
Every day we deal with a variety of matters of urgent importance in our organizations. Seldom is leadership development on that urgent list. While perhaps not urgent, few things are of greater importance to the future of our organizations that the conscious and consistent development of our future leaders. Unfortunately, when we do put time and effort into leadership development, all too often those efforts fail.
In this article I will outline seven specific things you can do – as an individual wanting to improve your leadership skills or when thinking about leadership development across an organization. Implementing any one of these suggestions will prove a valuable supplement to what you are already doing. Implementing most or all of them will yield or more confident, competent and prepared leaders than your existing development efforts by themselves ever will.
The Seven Suggestions
Create opportunities for self discovery and to create desire.
Learning anything successfully requires a motivated and interested learner. This is especially true for leadership. Often leaders see themselves as technical experts. In many cases they have been promoted because they were good at their previous jobs – which may have had nothing to do with leading. Leaders need to understand how influential they are and know how they are doing, what the gaps are and have a desire to improve. 360 Feedback processes are one way to raise awareness and create a felt need for improvement. While they can be a powerful tool, the underlying purpose for their use is to create a clear desire for further development. However you accomplish this discovery and desire, it is critical to the development of greater leadership skills.
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Leadership Development Requires Support
Leadership Development – How to be Supportive with Leadership Development
Developing leadership skills takes a lot of work on the part of the person trying to grow. Half the battle is simply deciding you are going to be a leader. Once that decision is made, all bets are off because leaders let nothing get in the way of achieving a goal. Therefore, those around that aspiring leader need to support him or her along the way. Two of the most important groups that need to maintain a supportive attitude are employers and spouses.
Developing Leaders as an Employer
If you are an employer, leadership development could be a very important component of your company growth and morale. You want to be the one to guide and influence the up-and-coming leaders in your midst. It makes sense to nurture your own staff and offer incentives. Employee morale improves when people realize they can be recognized for their accomplishments and grow with a company. Perhaps employees want more responsibility. Perhaps employees want more money and benefits. They usually want both. If you provide a means to nurture their leadership skills and give them reasons to stay, you bolster your company assets with additional loyal, skilled leaders.
There are several ways you can support leadership development as an employer. One way is to give education financial reimbursements to employees who take and satisfactorily approved business courses or complete degrees. It’s likely that an employee may need to work longer days in order to have one work day to attend school. If you offer flexible work hours, you incentivize your employees to grow. Another option is to offer in-house courses, or a one-time, offsite course. Some sales departments offer a basic sales certification course that is geared specifically to great sales skills and the company product.
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How To Design A Great Leadership Development Program: The Basics
When did you first begin to learn the concepts of good leadership? Did you receive formal training? Did someone help you along, or were you just thrown to the wolves to fend for yourself? Unfortunately, too many beginning leaders find themselves to be wolf-bait. If they survive, they might receive some type of “leadership development,” which often emphasizes management principles more than actual leadership. The smart, successful organization will design a leadership development program that develops leaders incrementally, beginning with first level managers.
The first step in a good leadership development program is to decide it’s important. By that I mean determine just how important leadership development is to your organization. The return on investment can be quite substantial, but it’s often difficult to measure. Surveys of people who quit their jobs reveal that a majority quit because of things leaders, often at the manager level, could have changed. Think about what bad leadership may be costing in employee turnover. How about customer service? What sort of image do employees who are unhappy with their leadership present to the customer? Another consideration is the overall efficiency of your operation. Employees who suffer under poor leadership are much less likely to be work to better the organization.
Tags: leadership assessment, leadership development