5 Actions to Improve Leadership Development in Your Firm
Filed under: Developing Others, Developing Yourself, Leadership Tip of the Day
When it comes to leadership development, sweeping corporate mandates and expensive training initiatives are rarely as effective as consistent blocking and tackling.
Your own practices are capable of creating a new and next generation of professionals that carry the right approaches and ultimately innovate and improve upon your achievements.
5 Actions You Can Take Now To Start a Leadership Revolution in your Firm:
1. Always strive to set the the example of the effective leader. No one is perfect, but word travels fast through an organization when some one and some team is meeting and beating targets, innovating, problem solving and somehow becoming a magnet for talent from other areas.
2. Be a relentless developer of talent: your support of the development of others through coaching, feedback, a supply of increasingly more difficult challenges and your encouragement of risk-taking in pursuit of innovation are all powerful tools at your disposal. You don’t need a budget or a training program to do any of this.
3. Encourage your team members to branch out into the organization. The better a developer of talent and the more success that you have at propagating your former team members into roles around the organization, the more likely you are to see your best leadership practices popping up all over the place.
4. Work leadership development into the corporate conversation. Ensure that strategy discussions ultimately encompass talent discussions…because no strategy can be executed without the right talent in place. Once there is broader awareness, encourage your peers to engage in activities that promote discussions and that lead to actions. An example is the simple, low-cost “leadership book club” activity that I’ve seen work so successfully at the senior and front-line leadership levels. Tie development actions to lessons-learned from the reading activities.
5. Build leadership development accountability into the organization. Hold your managers accountable for proving that they get it and are living it in the prosecution of their jobs.
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How Not to Build a Better Leader!
Filed under: Developing Others, Developing Yourself, Leadership & Career
I had a great conversation the other day with a talented twenty-something who just exudes confidence, competence and excitement about her career and her interest in professional development. Her reviews are top flight, she has been managing a major client account to great results, and she is actively pursuing her M.B.A. degree. This is one motivated young professional!
It’s too bad that her biggest dilemma is, “My job is fine, but I’m starting to get bored. I want some bigger challenges and I want to lead, and they keep telling me that they are working on a program for that. They also tell me that they are worried that any new projects will distract me from my main job. But I have the time and energy to do more.”
First, let’s tackle the program issue. A program for what? A program to figure out how to give an aggressive, capable person more responsibility? A program to magically teach someone how to lead, when there are ample opportunities to begin learning in the workplace every day?
You don’t need a stinking program to sit down with your team members and talk about next steps and then work together to define some good developmental challenges. You as manager and leader must be interested in ensuring that people are challenged, learning and growing. There’s no HR program in the world that replaces your responsibility to spend time challenging and coaching your team members. You own this responsibility.
As a manager and developer of early career talent, here’s a newsflash. Leadership and talent development is free. Your only cost is time and maybe a bit of creativity.
I like to apply Ram Charan’s “Apprenticeship” approach, where you as the manager are responsible for providing your employee with a series of increasingly ambiguous challenges. Over time as the individual confronts the challenges, they are gaining valuable and relatively risk-free experience learning to cope with the realities of more responsibility. (Note: I guide participants through one of these programs in my course: Considering the Move to Leadership-What to Expect and How to Prepare.)
Often, the outcome of this program is that individuals begin to zero in on what they truly want to do next…manage others, manage projects or focus on developing their skills as an individual contributor. Without the apprenticeship program to uncover interests and identify strengths and weaknesses, everyone is left guessing.
As for my conversation partner, I encouraged her to take the initiative to outline her own rough career plan and next general steps (she wants to lead) and then sit down with her managers and share this plan and ask for their help. She of course is responsible for convincing them that she is capable of executing here current role without missing a beat, and I encouraged her to position herself as someone both interested in contributing more and solving more problems as well as someone that welcomes coaching.
She will learn a lot about her managers if they continue to push her off, and she will learn a lot about herself if they appropriately support her. Either way, it’s worth politely pushing the issue.
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