Leadership Development
Traditionally, leadership development has focused on developing the leadership abilities and attitudes of individuals.
People are not all born with the same potential to lead well anymore than people do not all have the same ability to play football like Zinedine Zidane or sing like Luciano Pavarotti.
Different personal characteristics can help or hinder a person's leadership effectiveness and require formalized programs for developing leadership competencies. Yet, everyone can develop their leadership effectiveness. Achieving such development takes focus, practice and persistence more akin to learning a musical instrument than reading a book.
Classroom style training and associated reading is effective in helping leaders to know more about what is involved in leading well. Yet knowing what to do and doing what you know are two very different outcomes. It is estimated that as little 15% of learning from traditional classroom style training results in sustained behavioural change within the workplace.
The success of leadership development efforts has been linked to three variables:
- Individual learner characteristics;
- The quality and nature of the leadership development program;
- Genuine support for behavioural change from the leader's supervisor.
Personal characteristics associated with successful leadership development include the motivation to learn, a high achievement drive and personality traits and capabilities such as openness to experience, an internal focal point of control and self-monitoring.
Development is also more likely to occur when the design of the development program:
- Integrates a range of developmental experiences over a longer period of time (e.g. 9 - 12 months). These experiences may include 360 degree feedback, experiential classroom style programs, business school style course work, coaching and mentoring, reflective journaling and more;
- Involve goal setting, following an assessment of key developmental needs and then evaluate the achievement of goals after a given time period.
Some of the key concepts in leadership development are:
- Experiential learning: positioning the individual in the focus of the learning process, going through the four stages of experiential learning (David A. Kolb): concrete experience; observation and reflection; forming abstract concept and testing in new situations;
- Self efficacy: with the right training and coaching a trainees develop and strengthen the belief in their own capabilities to produce effects;
- Visioning: Developing the ability to formulate a clear image of an aspired future (personal, organisational etc.).
Acknowledgement: The above was taken (mostly) from WikiPedia's “Leadership Development”.
