If your business had more outstanding leaders, could you make changes more effectively? Could you create more innovative products and services? Could you increase employee engagement and therefore productivity & retention?
Yes, yes, and yes! If you don’t believe me and want to see the research, contact me. One of the best ways to improve your company’s performance is to improve the impact of its leaders. Even without the research, you know your company needs more outstanding leaders. Leaders who inspire and motivate. Those that bring the best out of people and teams. Outstanding leaders bring the future into today. They empower and engage employees and create high-performing teams. They create positive change. The more outstanding leaders you have, the more effective your organization!
“The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor, determines the success or failure of an organization.” Fred Fiedler
If you already know your business needs better and stronger leaders, how do you create more outstanding leaders? The secret is that leadership development only works if it is designed and implemented as a critical process that the CEO champions. It must be led, and it must be measured like any other successful business process.
A senior leader at a Fortune 100 company said to me that he was shocked that their development process began with a 360-degree leadership assessment. But, didn’t conclude with a follow-up assessment. He said we would never run a marketing campaign and not conduct a follow-up study to determine the results. Unfortunately, most leadership development programs don’t measure progress.
The biggest problems with leadership development processes are:
- It’s mostly event-based. Also, once the event is over so is the program.
- They focus primarily on providing content and/or too much emphasis on intellectual learning, which tells people the more you know, the better you lead – which is not true
- There is no involvement with outstanding leaders. This is because of not engaged mentors and/or managers of participants in the development process.
- The process does not utilize action learning
- The process lacks clear expectations of behavioral change and doesn’t help people learn how to change their habits/ create new habits (personal change)
- There is no real metrics or measurement of change over the course of the process
CEOs that want breakthrough leadership development, need to ensure their organizations use the best process possible. From my years of creating outstanding leaders, the best processes share some common variables:
- Starts and ends with a 360-degree assessment to document the process improvement. Measures the impact of improved leadership has on the business.
- Accurately identifies if there is a significant leadership problem and pinpoints mission-critical leadership strengths.
- Integrates learning events and time for development (apply what you have learned) with “deep practice”. (May include an action learning project outside of the business.)
- Teaches leaders how to rapidly develop leadership strengths and emerging strengths through gaining insights from reflection and coaching.
- Meaningfully includes others into the process; Feedback providers; Managers observe the progress and effort applied; Leadership mentors who can be role models; Fully engaged peers in their own process of development, etc.,
If your company is not developing leaders effectively or not rapidly developing leaders, I can help. For a free assessment and consultation about developing outstanding leaders contact me at [email protected]