There. I said it: leadership development is disruptive. And I’m serious.
It requires that you:
- Decide who should be trained (which can upset those who aren’t selected);
- Choose a process for training (which can take precious time that you don’t have);
- Pull those selected for training out of their regular day-to-day work (which – since they’re your best employees – means they’re not focused on what you really need them to do);
- Take the risk of spending precious resources – time, money, energy – on possibly-uncertain outcomes (since leadership training doesn’t always return the desired results).
Ouch. It’s no wonder that leadership development is often postponed until there’s a problem (bad leadership habits have developed) or until you’re ready to groom someone for a senior executive position.
Especially when you’re not a big company with a ton of resources to bring to bear. Small and medium-sized businesses may be the lifeblood of our economy, but that doesn’t mean they have the means to do what they might wish or like to do.
However, let’s face it: we all know it’s true that your mid-level and first-line managers have the most impact on your individual employees. And that means they’re the ones influencing your company culture – for better or for worse. (Heard the saying “people join companies but leave managers”? It’s no joke.)
So – what can you do? These seem like conflicting realities: resource constraints and uncertainty on the one side, and employee engagement, productivity, and long-term success on t’other. Yikes.
What would happen if you integrated your leadership development into your day-to-day work – and especially into those top-priority, high-value projects?
There’s an interesting rule called the 70-20-10 rule, which states that 70% of learning comes from doing, 20% comes from observing in relationship, and only 10% comes from actual instruction.
Now, obviously instruction is important; there are tools and practices we need to learn before we can do.
And equally obviously, you can’t just toss your best people into the deep end of a critical project or shove them into leadership of a high-visibility team and expect them to succeed.
You need a balance. You need a defined process of integrating leadership development into your most-essential day-to-day work – the doing part – supported by coaching and mentoring and the appropriate amount of skills development through training.
This solves the resource allocation problem – you no longer need to pull your best people away from what they need to be doing.
And it decreases risk on all fronts, since you’re supporting your best people in doing the work you most need them to do, whilst simultaneously giving them the skills they need to do an even better job and produce even better results.
Yes, it takes some extra work up front. But that’s adviseable no matter what you choose to do, because let’s be real here: while it can be tempting to throw training at a problem, it’s often not the best solution.
This is a high-level description of the process I use with my clients. Want to learn more? Let’s talk. Contact me and we’ll set a time for a brief conversation to see how I might be able to help.