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.
As defined, leadership development refers to any method or activity that aims to enhance the quality of leadership within an individual or a person heading an organization. Before, leadership development activities are very rigid, formal and strict because the people who are conducting them want to ensure that everything should be in a formal setting. The leadership development activities before were only confined to Masters in Business Administration (MBA) style programs that are usually offered in prestigious universities and business schools.
But now, the trends in leadership development have shifted into a more laid back and personal setting. Although there is still the serious and formal aspect of it, many people who conduct it are incorporating other means to motivate the participants to actively join the sessions. Some of the trends in leadership development these days include action learning which uses movements in teaching leadership values.
Others make use of trails, adventure courses as well as high-ropes to help participants discover their inner leadership potentials. There are also those who indulge in executive retreats believing that these busy people need a quiet and peaceful environment to reflect on their issues and hopefully, come out as better individuals and better leaders.
Types of leadership development
Leadership development can be applied into two settings—an individual setting or a group setting. In developing individual leaders, traditional approaches are usually used. These usually focus on targeting the individual’s leadership abilities as well as assessing the attitudes of individuals when it comes to leading other people or an organization.
Experts say that leadership may be innate to some people but if not recognized early and not nurtured properly, the effectiveness of his or her ability to lead may decrease over a period of time. To help people with innate leadership skills achieve their fullest potentials, it is a must for them to undergo leadership development as soon as possible.
However, individual leadership development may be hard at first since it is not easy to deal with different personal characteristics that usually hinder the effectiveness of a person's leadership. Experts say that for an individual to enhance his or her leadership, he or she must undergo formalized programs to address issues and improve leadership competencies. But individuals can enhance their leadership skills on their own by developing their focus and their persistence in learning new things.
Aside from developing individual leadership, there is another method of getting the best out of a leader and that is through the help of other people. Unlike in individual leadership development that focuses on specific attributes of a leader such as behavior, ways of thinking, or feeling, the collective leadership development focuses on the development of leadership as a process.
Meaning, this type of leadership development will target interpersonal relationships, the social influence process, and the team dynamics between the leader and his/her team. It will also focus on factors that surround the team such as the organizational climate as well as the social network linkages among the organization and between its members.