I’ve been involved in helping people in their personal development goals and over the last few years, to also develop leaders within organizations. I’ve found that there are a few things that are necessary in order for a proper Leader Development Program to benefit organizations.
- A willingness to seek and accept feedback. This is necessary because before actually developing leaders, you’ll need to find them and listen to what they need. With a proper set of feedback, you can better tailor the program to suit your organization’s needs. You might need to set up a representative task force at different levels of hierarchy. This will enable the program to focus on essentials within the organization.
- A properly structured development plan. This leadership development plan should span all hierarchies and also include proper guidelines for supervision and appraisal, as well as a chance to demonstrate these competencies. A competency development or assessment center can be created to pool resources, for instance.
- Follow through. It is imperative for such an exercise to include team members who are committed to ensure that the entire system works, and continues to find ways to keep the system running.
In an attempt to keep things flowing, however, are some of these elements:
- Drivers/champions to keep the energy flowing in this project;
- Complementing team members;
- A team of dedicated trainers (for knowledge transfer) and coaches (for long term assessment and development of leaders);
- A competency and assessment team (people who are concerned about pushing leaders to the next level, not just policing the system);
- A performance enhancement and learning transfer team that focuses on ideas to improve assessment methods and to measure how such assessment results in real returns back to the workplace.
As you probably can tell, this can cost the organization a lot. But if organizations are really serious, they have to begin to engage their leaders at this level and initiate the evolution of their human resource and performance enhancement systems.
Stuart Tan, MBA, SDCG, BA (Hons), is a Licensed NLP Trainer since 1997, a trained counselor and therapist since 1999, and a leadership, team performance and change management consultant. He certifies NLP Practitioners and Master Practitioners through a competency based approach. He is also an executive coach and life coach.
Contact him for information about his corporate seminars, certification workshops and coaching services.