The problem with leadership development programs nowadays is the expense for bringing in outside consultants or initiating the program. This can be back-breaking for a small company or mid-level size business. The question that you're asking is whether it's worth it to institute such a program. The short answer is, yes! The advantages of leadership development will eventually outweigh its disadvantages. Let's see a few reasons why you should be setting up such a program for your business:
a) Better Employee Morale – the obvious result of having a leadership development program is the happiness of your employees. Good leadership inspires employee contentment. This is because they can trust in their leaders to the right thing for them. A bad leader or manager can be a disaster for a company. Employees should be able to believe that their superiors are looking out for their well-being and that they are competent. Bad leaders lower this confidence and wrecks the relationship between employees and management.
b) Lowers Employee Loss - One of the advantages of having high employee happiness is that they are less prone to leaving. This prevents the loss of skilled and trained workers and enables your company to work at a consistent level of performance. Training employees up to par is an expensive and time-consuming process and you would be wise to avoid having veteran workers leave.
c) Better Worker Performance – Happy employees work better. This is a fact. Having your people be content to be working their jobs is not just enough though. Good leaders can inspire their followers to work better and to do more for their company. Of course, they won't do it for free but with an inspirational head at the lead, they won't whine so much and sometimes they'll even be glad to do it.
d) Keeps The Company On-Track – Good leaders know the pulse of the company. This means they can see how issues can sometimes affect the companies' employees. Heading off any problems before they begin, they can keep the company focused on work and not be blindsided by petty issues or surprise problems. This also gives them a chance to plan for the future and give the company a clear set of goals that the company can aim for.
e) Cultivates New Innovations – Effective leaders encourage a culture that develops talent. This is because good leaders recognize that they cannot see everything and do everything. Their team members have to do their part. An open environment that encourages feedback and independent thinking is exactly the right sort of place for future innovations and prospective leaders to shine. This will help your business in the long run.
f) It's Cheaper Than It Looks – Finally, leadership development is not as expensive as you think it is. Good books like John Maxwell's “101” series can give you the basics that you need to develop your own leadership skills. The other half of the know-how is the willingness to do it – and that costs almost next to nothing.
Leadership development is the wave of the future and you should get your company on that wave as soon as possible.
Being a leader can be innate to some people. But, without leadership development these skills may not be enhanced, thus, the true potentials of the leader may not come out.
These days, leadership development is usually categorized into two including individual leadership development and group leadership development. The first one usually focuses on the specific leadership traits of an individual while the second one is more on seeing leadership development as a process wherein the surrounding people and the working environment are involved.
Developing your own leadership skills
If you feel that you have great chances of becoming an effective leader, then now is the time to consider enhancing your leadership skills on your own. For you to do that, you must first assess what hinders you to being an effective leader. For some, it it’s their personal issues and problems while others is because of their inability to understand and accept certain situations. To be able to overcome these issues and emerge as a better leader, you must:
- Forgive yourself and let the past go. Experts say that many people have the great potential to become effective leaders only that they cling on so much to the past and couldn’t forgive themselves for the mistakes that they have committed. If you want to become an effective leader, try to accept that there are things that are beyond your control. Then, you will be able to forgive yourself and start anew. If you just keep thinking of the past, this will serve as a reminder of your failure. And if you keep thinking about your defeat, you will undergo a never ending cycle of blaming yourself for the things that you did not really opted to do.
- Have a dream and hold on to it. To lead is not easy task to start with. It would require lots of efforts and self-assessment to be able to maximize your full potentials as leader. For people who would want to reap the benefits of good leadership in the future, they should start now by having a dream that they could hold on to. The scale or the size of that dream doesn’t matter, it can be a big thing or a small thing, what's important is the person is willing to do everything to achieve that dream.
For some people, having big dreams work on them because they are looking forward to big rewards in the future that is why they are giving their best this early. While some people opt to have small dreams because they want to make sure that they will be able to accomplish that dream and won't have to deal with defeat or failure in the future.
- Always take one step ahead. Leadership development on your own means you have to be able to continuously motivate yourself despite so many problems. You can do this by taking one step ahead of things, meaning, you need to plan ahead and do things ahead of time so you will be given more opportunity or chance in case the first plan did not work.