A More Reliable Approach to Leadership Development |
Posted: April 26, 2019 |
Leadership “training” is currently a major focus of management as established managers seek to identify and promote individuals they feel could assume a leadership role in their current company. One problem with that approach is that you can't “train leaders,” you have to “develop” them. In fact, if training employees is all your leadership development consists of, you're relying on blind luck to have any chance of succeeding at all. Here is why. The Problem with TrainingTraining is a static, rote process, where an employee is given a system to learn and then is given a test or series of tests to make sure they have absorbed whatever information was the point of the training. Training leaves very little room for thinking, innovation or improvisation. There is a right way and a wrong way of doing things and if you deviate from the right way, no matter the outcome, you are doing it the wrong way. Worse, training is backward-looking, based on prior needs. This serves the purpose of training, which is to instill a reaction in a person. It does very little beyond that. How Leadership Development is DifferentLeadership development has very little parameters, including much of an “end date.” People can always develop skills, accumulate knowledge, gain wisdom, long after the formal development or leadership conference, training or session has concluded. There is no end to an individual’s development potential, nor is there a timeline. Additionally, while training is finite and focused on past experiences, leadership is oriented towards the future and future needs. It takes existing processes and adapts them to meet those needs or it develops new processes. How to Fix itWhile training works with some levels of employees, it doesn't account for the changing environment that is a huge part of leadership. Leaders don't need training for the most part; they need coaching. That is a much different approach than the existing mindset that says “send them to a leadership conference and they can learn how to lead.” Coaching them means working intensively with them to help them develop and bring out the skills that they possess naturally. Training can also be done at the same time, but the focus is on letting them experiment, learn and develop new skills that systemic training does not allow to be nurtured. Today’s processes that assume individuals can be trained in leadership go about it wrong; leadership development is a learning process with no set agenda regarding systemic needs. By refocusing leadership coaching to that mindset, better-prepared leaders will emerge with the skills, tangible and intangible, they need to succeed.
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