Developing Individual Leaders
Traditionally, leadership development has focused on developing the leadership abilities and attitudes of individuals.
Just as people are not all born with the ability or desire to play football (soccer) like Zinedine Zidane or sing like Luciano Pavarotti, people are not all born with the ability to lead. Different personal traits and 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. However, knowing what to do and doing what you know are two very different outcomes; management expert Henry Mintzberg is one person to highlight this dilemma. It is estimated that as little as 15% of learning from traditional classroom style training results in sustained behavioral 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 behavioral change from the leader's supervisor
Military officer training academies, such as the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, go to great lengths to only accept candidates who show the highest potential to lead well. Personal characteristics that are associated with successful leadership development include leader motivation to learn, a high achievement drive and personality traits such as openness to experience, an internal focus 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 set period of time (e.g. 6–12 months). These experiences may include 360 degree feedback, experiential classroom style programs, business school style coursework, executive coaching, reflective journaling, mentoring and more.
- Involve goal setting, following an assessment of key developmental needs and then evaluate the achievement of goals after a given time period.
Among key concepts in leadership development one may find:
- Experiential learning: positioning the individual in the focus of the learning process, going through the four stages of experiential learning as formulated by David A. Kolb: 1. concrete experience 2. observation and reflection 3. forming abstract concept 4. testing in new situations.
- Self efficacy: The right training and coaching should bring about 'Self efficacy' in the trainee, as Albert Bandura formulated: A person's belief about his capabilities to produce effects
- Visioning: Developing the ability to formulate a clear image of the aspired future of an organization unit.
A good personal leadership development program should enable you to develop a plan that helps you gain essential leadership skills required for roles across a wide spectrum from a youth environment to the corporate world. These characteristics include:
- Taking responsibility
- Gaining focus
- Developing life purpose
- Starting action immediately
- Developing effective and achievable goals and dreams.
Read more about this topic: Leadership Development
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