Leaders, By Role or Inclination
Why is a leadership development strategy essential?
Over the past 18 months, I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership development. Partially, this is because my role changed 18 months ago, and I began working with a population of employees who are thinking about what it means to be in a leadership role at work. Some are people managers, some want to be people managers, some just want to be leaders in their fields. For the past year, we’ve been discussing what leadership means.
Often times, when organizations pursue leadership development, they mean ‘people management training’, which is an important aspect to be sure. The training usually covers organizational policy on supervision, performance management, and communication and other soft skills. It might include best practices for people management, strategic thinking and planning. Some organizations require their managers to complete some training, many others do not. Frequently, leadership development is aimed at teaching management to managers.
But it could be so much more. Expansive, grassroots, leadership development can build and change work cultures, increase effectiveness, and drive innovation, because it recognizes the fundamental capacity of people to impact each other. Leadership development is essential for individuals, teams and organizations because we are all responsible for the worlds and cultures we create and operate in. That responsibility increase relative to the amount of power a person or system hold, but even a person who manages no one else and has relatively little organizational power can build their capacity for leadership.
What makes up an expansive, organizational leadership development strategy?
A definition of leadership aligned with the organization’s mission & vision
Agreement of the values, behaviors and skills needed to participate as a leader
A plan to identify those value, behaviors, and skills in action, and identify where and how they’re not.
A plan and methodology to build build those skills, reward those behaviors, and align individual values with organizational values. This might include:
Training
Executive coaching
Managers as coaches
Team development
Incorporating the leadership values, behaviors & skills into your performance evaluation process
What makes this strategy grass-roots is to consider everyone in your organization as you do this. Collaborating with your frontline staff around what is leadership and what makes a good leader might look different than doing so with the C-Suite, but imagine what kind of leadership definition that might yield for your organization! Leadership values, behaviors and skills might present differently for your individual contributors vs your managers, but imagine if both groups were actively oriented to being effective leaders (and could hold each other accountable for being effective leaders!)
“Leadership is a process that takes place among people working together toward positive change.”
-Leadership for a better world: Understanding the social change model of leadership by Komives, S. R., Wagner, W., & Associates
Leadership Development in a Nutshell
I love theory. Theory tells us how things ought to work, or how they probably will work. Theory provides us with parameters to consider and compare with what we are experiencing, gives us concepts that can help us plan out our actions, and helps us problem solve things we haven’t encountered before.
Leadership development has many iterations, lens, foci, but can be summed up in three main dimensions:
Leadership theory: Schools of thought that attempt to explain what makes some individuals ‘leaders’ emphasised by traits and behaviours.
Leadership style: The ‘method’ used by leaders to provide direction, motivate others and achieve outcomes
Leadership climate: The emotional ‘tone’ set by leaders within the environment in which they lead
Leadership theory usually includes:
What is leadership?
Who is a leader?
What traits does a effective leader have and what behaviors do they use?
This is a good overview of the major leadership theories out there.
Leadership styles: multitudes
Leadership style refers to methods that leaders might utilize to accomplish their goals. There are many, many leadership styles, some of which you may have already hear of: transactional, transformations, servant etc. We’ll explore these more next week, but the biggest indicator of leadership effectiveness is the ability to choose the right tool for the job. No one style is king.
How do leaders create and are responsible for climate?
Climate in an organization refers to perceptions. In turn, climate create culture, which refers to beliefs. We see how an org and its people operate, and that influences what we believe will happen. How you are perceived as a leader, your traits, behaviors, motivations, and choices, add up into the climate of your team and your organization.
How do we develop?
These three dimensions provide us in roads into what we need to learn & practice as individuals and organizations. Leadership development should involve understanding, practice and self discovery. We need to learn about theory, style, climate, behaviors and traits. We also need an opportunity to practice what we’ve learned, and engage in active reflection to better understand ourselves and others.
Leadership Links
What Leadership Development Should Look Like in the Hybrid Era
“We’ve found that meaningful values, as a management practice, were a core differentiator of companies that maintained a healthy culture during COVID-19. Companies were able to drive an innovation agenda when they emphasized bottom-up innovation, harnessed ideas from the front lines, and encouraged employee creativity and entrepreneurship in getting work done. We also saw healthy companies emphasizing the free flow of information—knowledge sharing, performance transparency—as well as practices like role clarity and operational discipline. Successful companies were innovating and shaping new solutions and translating them back into systems and processes.” -Culture in the hybrid workplace