LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Defining Leadership Development

“What is Leadership Development?" is a question needed to be answered first. Leadership Development (LD) is a set of activities integrating learning and practising skillset, understanding oneself, and empowering and working with others to enhance competencies and confidence of leaders and thrive business. This could be achieved through a Leadership Development Program (LDP).

The Essential of Leadership Development

Leadership development is critical for the long-term success of any organisation. To build effective teams, optimise your employees' competencies and prepare the next generation of leaders, you have to invest in leadership development.

Development encourages a forward-thinking, two-way conversation. Unlike training, where the main focus is on how to do things the right way, development emphasises how things ought to be done in the future.

The benefits of LDP are:

• Increased organisational productivity
• Improved in time to competency
• Reduced staff turnover
• Increased organisational revenue

Leadership development program (LDP)

Having targeted leadership development programs for each management level is quintessential in ensuring there are no skill gaps and the change in position happens smoothly.

Each level of your managers faces different challenges. Shifting from managing oneself to managing others, and eventually managing leaders, requires individuals to develop particular skill sets. Training delivery methods also vary upon the level:

• Developing emerging leaders/individual contributors
• Developing mid-level leaders
• Developing senior leaders

Post-development reinforcement is to strengthen your leadership pipeline as well as ensuring the move of your leaders across levels occurs flawlessly, it all comes down to effectively identify the right candidates.

Planning an LDP

Employees do want to know if there are opportunities within the company that can help leverage their career advancement.

A well-established leadership development plan shows your appreciation towards your employees. Many managers and organisations underestimate the power of appreciation and recognition. If you show that you care about your staff’s future, the likelihood of them remain loyal to you will be higher.

Each leader level is critical to the organisation. Their particular needs have to be addressed using the right leadership strategy. We can increase the learning retention, remember what we learn for longer with the right reinforcement strategy.

High potential employees quitting can be extremely costly. Letting your talents know the company has laid out development programs to prepare them for more senior management roles is one of the most effective methods to mitigate the impact of talent loss. Employee leadership development methods could vary from mentorship, training, stretch assignments and rotation programs to develop high potential employees for your business.

Leadership Feedback

Following up to LDP, assessing your leadership skills is a first step to developing it. 360-degree feedback is a tool, a method to develop an individual’s behaviour and performance. It utilises data received confidentially from those the employee work with to gain whether their performance fits in with the company’s overall visions.

360° feedback is a useful leadership assessment for companies that actively seek to make continual improvements for the good of the business as well as individual employees. This is a highly recommended product in terms of types of feedback surveys.

It is important to illustrate that the feedback is primarily for the benefit of the employee receiving the feedback, only the person who receives the feedback can choose whether or not to develop performance to reach a high level of potential to become a leader. 

Factors impacting LDP

Time and again, the term "leadership development" is vaguely defined, confusing both employees and top management, preventing organisations from developing effective leaders. Unable to grasp the true meaning results in individuals mistaking the leadership development program (LDP) for management training and overlooking the context.

Moreover, leaders and program organisers often detach the learning from real-life experience, making classroom training inapplicable. Supporting from top management, and organisational focus on people and talent management, and having sufficient resources are the top three factors influencing directly in building an effective leadership development.

Pitfalls in Leadership Development

The process of developing your leadership skills and implementing them effectively is not simple. The top three leadership challenges to avoid in the development process are:

• Overestimate one business book
• Misunderstand the required leadership skills
• Confuse “manager” and “leader” terms

Tight spot for LD

Classifying performance and potential in LP can be seen as a leadership dilemma situation for business because it might lead to a shortage of quality talent and the failed assumption of new leaders in the workforce. Many often confuse "high performing" with "high potential" though these two terms are drastically different. So, how do we distinguish high potentials from high performers?

Your workforce is a mix of potential and performance with greatly varying degrees. As a manager, you should thoroughly assess them across both dimensions.

By establishing systematic programs to develop high potentials and leveraging scientific assessments, organisations can keep all the leadership pitfalls at bay and nurture a strong, capable talent pipeline.

Leadership at its core is still about mobilising people in an organisation around common goals to achieve impactful results. Its foundation boils down to the basic skills used by many leaders in any organisation.

The question is: What makes a great leader? Leadership skills include communication, resolving conflict, teamwork and understanding emotional concepts are the fundamentals that most leaders adapt to best fit the job description, but there should be a need to cultivate these skills effectively with programs that teach the foundations of leadership (the accountability, delegation and communication).

In the leadership position, perhaps anyone wants to be recognised as having high-performance leadership. However, many leaders now fail to achieve that goal. Then, they slip on the path of self-assertion, not bringing their team’s general efficiency. It’s necessary to be aware of the aspects in which high-performance leadership is expressed.

• The leader’s ways of thinking
• The leader’s action and choices of behaviour
• The leader’s choices of words
• The leader’s decision on the action time

Collaborative Leadership

Collaborative leadership is an enhanced relationship between managers and employees. They cooperate to accomplish a shared goal. Leaders must be able to work with people from other teams, branches or from another department to make sure the workflows and ideas are aligned without any confusion.

What makes a collaborative leader? Leaders need to nurture their emotional intelligence and social engagement, i.e. the ability to control and deeply understand the emotions, desires and motivations of their team members.

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is also one of the first steps to become a successful leader, especially a collaborative one.

leaders should be open to new ideas, learn from their employees and develop the team as a whole. Put aside their ego, collaborative leaders encourage shared knowledge, power and credit, navigate both themselves and their team into a mutual purpose.

Peer Leadership

The power of peer leadership cannot be denied. It comes from social help that people are likely to reckon as more pleasant and less frightening than that given by superiors and manager.

There are many ways a peer leader can boost team productivity:

• Supporting teammates by providing social-support networks
• Guiding them to chances and resources they need
• Being the one that helps the team get through the up and downtime