Leadership Development - First break all the rules

As a Learning professional, you may be asked to work on a Leadership Development program at some point in your career. Developing strong and capable leaders is imperative to sustaining a growing organisation, so obviously this is a really high value exercise. Typically leaders learn as they expand their experiences over time:

1. 70% of their capability from work experience;
2. 20% of their capability from role models and mentors;
3. 10% from training and readings;

While your program can take care of (2) and (3), its real value comes when you can leverage the 70% learning from work experience. There are a few things I believe learning organisations can do differently to build a more effective Leadership Development program. I believe the idea is to break some of the traditional rules. Here are a few rules I would break, if I had the opportunity.

Rule to break - Pick your Top performers

Guy Kawasaki, in the Art of Recruiting talks about the value of having A players in the organisation and the fact that A players attract A and A+ players. Organizations often have A players, regular players and then the C players. Often the C players drag the organisation for way too long before they leave the system. Most appraisal systems fail to recognise C players in time to exit them. The A players are the ones that get the opportunity to participate in a Leadership Development program. While in the interest of fairness, this choice seems logical -- I believe in targeting the biggest share of the pie. How about a Leadership Development program that targets the regular players in your organisation? Indeed, its tough to scale a program that covers 70% of your people; but the idea is to make leadership a culture. When your regular players practise and demonstrate leadership skills, it ups the ante for your A players and forces them to raise their game. In effect by starting from the bottom up, you can not only create a high performing organisation -- you also push your A players to be A+ players!

Rule to break - Look inside, then look outside

A common tendency in organisations is to get very bogged down with history, rules, regulations, culture or climate. If none of these things existed because you were just starting up, then how would you approach the problem? How would another company you admire, solve the problem? There's a case to apply this approach to thinking through your leadership development program. Instead of reinventing the wheel, explore how other organisations solve the Leadership Development program. Instead of thinking of how unique your organisation is,(every company is and isn't very unique!) think of how you could model a similar program in your company. If you really believe a particular model makes a lot of sense, then it perhaps does. Overcoming organisational limitations is just one extra step in your program plan. One of the models I've been quite amazed by, is the Leaders and Teachers program by Becton, Dickinson and Company. You may end up finding many more -- starting with a model is much better than reinventing the wheel.

Rule to break - Try to fill your future positions

Leadership is a set of skills, not a position. Its but natural to look at your future positions and tune your Leadership Development program to fill those positions. I understand this business need. This however, is succession planning and not Leadership Development. Leadership is a set of skills that an organisation needs to grow amongst its people. Its almost a culture. Your program should seek to develop these skills as against just filling positions. Think about growing expert communicators, adept coaches, proficient communicators and efficient managers. Everyone doesn't need to display all the skills, a strong awareness should be good enough. Open the program to everyone, regardless of whether they're ready to fill future positions or not. Only then can Leadership be a part of your culture.

Rule to break - Only people in current managerial positions have the opportunity to lead

As I mentioned earlier, Leadership is a set of skills - not limited to a position. Organisations tend to believe that people already managing departments, portfolios or people are the people to grow as future leaders. I believe that there's a leadership role for everyone. Robert Dilts in his landmark book, From Coach to Awakener says that coaches address a variety of factors, including but not limited to:

• Environmental Factors: The considerations of where and when success occurs.
• Behavioural Factors: The specific actions to reach success.
• Capabilities: The mental maps, plans or strategies that lead to success.
• Beliefs and Values: The reasons for taking a particular path versus another and the deeper motivations which drive people to act in a certain way.
• Identity Factors: The factors that determine who the person percieves herself to be. These factors relate to their sense of purpose and mission.

To each of these logical levels you can associate a specific kind of leadership; Caretaking and Guidance, Coaching, Teaching, Mentorship, Sponsorship. As you can see each person in your organisation can take up a leadership role suited to them. Indeed, some people may only be able to do Caretaking for environmental factors and others may limit themselves to coaching only. That said, these are leadership roles for your entire company. Yet again, if leadership is to be a part of your culture then think of how your program is inclusive of most of your workforce as against being limited to only a select few.

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Leadership is one of my favourite blogging topics and I'm extremely passionate about growing the right kind of leadership. How did you find today's blogpost? Feel free to write to me and comment liberally on this post. If you liked this post, you may like some of my other posts about the same topic.