Not all people who conduct leadership development are sensitive to the needs of different kinds of leaders. They don’t realize that there are those leaders who rely or depend on other people or experiences just to keep them going while there are those who rely on themselves in bringing out their leadership skills.
If you are part of a group that conducts leadership development, then you must know that using the traditional and formal approach no longer works. Now, even leaders want activities that are not purely based on books and theories but they want real life learning.
Since many clients prefer non-traditional leadership development, you must know how to develop strategies to ensure that they will be satisfied with the outcome. Today, one of the most common and effective approaches that are being used in leadership development is incorporating the concept of self-motivation.
This is because many experts believe that leaders these days need lots of reflection and self-assessment. Self motivation is very important for leaders because it will help them know what are their strengths as well as their weaknesses. If a leader knows what his or her strengths are, that person will be able to continue what he or she is doing and even enhance it. On the other hand, knowing one's weaknesses is as equally as important because through this, the person will know what the areas he or she should improve on are. If one knows his or her weaknesses, he or she might be able to turn these into opportunities that will make him or her successful in the future.
To ensure that the participants will be receptive to the idea of using self motivation to develop good leadership skills, then you must carefully explain to them how does it work. Make them understand that it is through being motivated that an effective leader can set his or her mind into something. Setting one’s mind into something will help him or her look forward to the results of what they are aiming for.
The next best thing that you can tell participants during leadership development is to start with small and simple tasks. Being a leader might be easy for some but for others, this is a very difficult to be effective in it. Make your participants understand that if they start small and simple, he or she will be able to accomplish these goals the easier and faster way. If simple goals are set and achieved this early, they will be able to earn self-confidence that they will need in facing greater and bigger challenges ahead.
Experts agree leadership development is very important factor for people who are aiming for success in their lives. This is also important because it gives the person a sense of freedom in choosing paths that he or she has to take. Through the values that are taught during the activities, leaders are given the chance to maneuver or control their own lives which in the future, will help them be the best persons that they want to be.
In the past, companies maintain their office machines better than their employees. Today, however, the most forward-looking corporations are all into leadership development.
This shift in perspective on people had actually been triggered by the long-term shift itself of the world economy. From a total dependence on financial capital, economies all over are now dependent on human capital.
Human resources
In the midst of economic upswings and downswings, companies have realized that money for investment is abundant than ever before. Even in the middle of the present economic crunch, money had been deposed as the number one scarce resource in business.
Human talent, however, is now the scarcer commodity. As the CEO of a top recruiting company says, “Organizations need talented people a lot more than talented people need organizations.”
Companies of a feather
There is now a growing trend of companies who developed their people with opportunities to learn and grow to become higher-performing organizations. A closer look at these companies reveals a striking resemblance of their practices.
Operating all kinds of businesses and based from all over the world, these organizations share similar traits in creating leadership development programs.
Time and money investment
To cut to the chase, running leadership development programs is expensive – both in money and time. CEOs, however, think that this is “the single best investment” they make in their company.
Many companies claim they are all interested in developing leaders. Today, most of the companies evaluate their own executives partly on how they develop people.
Promising leaders’ early identification
Spotting promising leaders early on can result in their earlier development. Some companies who have internship programs use the time the interns spend with them to evaluate their potentials.
Companies who nurture their future leaders early on believe that they have a competitive edge. Their talent reserves become bigger and better than the others.
Strategic assignment choices
In a typical leadership development process, two-thirds of the candidates come from job experience, one-third from mentoring and coaching and a smattering come straight from classrooms.
Mixing job assignments are tough, even if they looked okay at first. Organizations tend to assign people based on what they are good at, and not on what they need to work on. Managers had consistently reported that their hardest experiences were the most helpful in the end.
Developing leaders on the job
There is tension among the CEOs who want to develop their people by moving them about and in their need to develop them in their expertise in certain areas.
Other companies solve it by leaving their leaders in their exact productive places and having them rotated in other jobs through short-term work assignments. They do not leave their present positions but they can take on short additional assignments.
Feedback and support
In learning, if you do not know how you have performed, chances are you will not learn at all and you will not care later. In many companies, feedback is very rare.
Many successful CEOs declared that frequent and honest assessment with plenty of mentoring and support has propelled them to the top.
All in all, companies now view leadership development as a real investment venture, albeit in human forms rather than in cold forms of machines made of metal.