HOW TO GROW LEADERS IN YOUR ORGANIZATION

When you are young, or at least upon the early rungs of your career, you are understandably focused upon developing to
the full your own potential as a leader, but once you are in
a leadership role at team level you have a responsibility for
developing the individuals in your team (the third circle), and
that includes their abilities as leaders. At the strategic level, so
important is this work of fostering effective leaders for today’s
performance and tomorrow’s growth that it constitutes one of the
seven core functions that together make up the role. How do you
do it?
Exercise
Imagine that you have just taken over as the chief
executive of a group of private companies employing
6,000 people in the private healthcare sector. You have
asked your director of human resource to write a paper
for you to be entitled ‘Towards a group strategy for
leadership development’.
What elements would you like to see in it?
Principle one: develop a strategy
for leadership development
The key to achieving sustainable business success is to have
excellence in leadership at all three levels. Strategic, operational
and team leaders need to work harmoniously together as the
organisation’s leadership team.
The most common and most expensive error that
organisations are committing at present is to focus leadership
development on their more senior managers, so that becomes
their entire ‘strategy’. In so doing, they completely ignore their
team leaders. Yet it is the team leader who is closest to the
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customer. Make sure that your strategy embraces all three levels.
There is a useful distinction to be made between strategic
thinking and strategic planning. You should see your leadership
development strategy – evolved and guided by a small steering
group – as part of your overall business strategy. It should be
longer-term (five to 10 years). Don’t let the urgent deflect you
from the important, for a strategy worth the name should be
three-dimensional:
• importance – it really has to matter;
• longer-term – it takes time to grow trees;
• multi-factored – it takes more than one element or
approach to make a strategy.
The remaining principles will give you an idea of what those
various elements should be. It is when there is synergy – the key
elements working together in harmony – that your organisation
will begin to grow leaders.
Principle two: selection
‘Smith is not a born leader yet.’ When those words appeared on a
manager’s report in the 1950s, nobody thought that the person in
question could do anything about it – still less the organisation
that employed him. As a saying of the day had it, ‘Leaders are
born and not made.’
We don’t think like that now. The action-centred leadership
course based on the three-circle model that was developed in the
1960s proved once and for all that the proverb was only halftrue – leaders can be trained or developed. The other half of the
truth, however, is that people do vary in their relative amount of
leadership potential. Since it is not easy to develop leaders, why
not hire people who are halfway – or more – there already? Or at
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least make sure that when you recruit from outside – or promote
from inside – you know how to select those with a high potential
for becoming effective leaders, for it is leaders who will grow
your business rather than just administering it.
Remember that a person can be appointed a manager at any
level, but he or she is not a leader until the appointment has
been ratified in the hearts and minds of those who work with the
person. If too few managers in your organisation are receiving
that kind of accolade, who is to blame? Not the manager in
question, I suggest, but those who failed to apply principle two
when they appointed the person in question. You cannot teach a
crab to walk straight.
Principle three: training for
leadership
To train implies instruction with a specific end in view; educate
implies attempting to bring out latent capabilities. Of course,
there is no hard-and-fast line between training and education.
Think of it more as a spectrum of combinations between the two
poles. For brevity’s sake, I shall refer here to both as training.
As part of your strategic thinking, you should identify your
business training needs in the leadership context and assign
them priorities. Bear in mind always that training of any kind
is going to cost your organisation time and money. You need
courses or programmes that are effective – they produce good
leadership – and also cost-effective (in terms of time and money).
If you have large numbers (like the NHS), you need high-volume,
high-quality and low-cost courses.
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The first level to look at is your team leaders, alias first-line
managers. Do newly appointed team leaders have training in
leadership prior to or shortly after appointment? In my view, it is
actually morally wrong to give a person a leadership role without
some form of training – wrong for the person and wrong for
those who work with the person. We do not entrust our children
to bus drivers who have no training, so why place employees
under the direction of untrained leaders?
If you outsource your in-company leadership training to
external providers, make sure that you retain ‘ownership’ and
control, so that the programmes fit in with your strategy and
organisational ethos. Delegation never means abdication.
Principle four: career development
People grow as leaders by the actual practice of leading. There
is no substitute for experience. What organisations almost
uniquely can do is to give people opportunities to lead. The trick
here is to give a person the right job at the right time. It should be
the kind of leadership role that is realistic but challenging for the
individual concerned. No stretch, no growth.
If your organisation is serious about applying this principle,
it will, for example, have a conversation once a year with each
leader or would-be leader in which it outlines what it has in
mind for the individual concerned. Equally, such a meeting is
an opportunity for the individual to be proactive and to say what
he or she aspires to do. The individual may, for example, want
to move out of a specialist role to a more generalist (leadership)
one. Fitting together this jigsaw of hopes and expectations is
the name of the game, and it should be a win-win situation. A
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strategic leader in the making – possibly as your successor – will
need experience in more than one functional area of the business
and, if you are an international company, in more than one
country.
Principle five: line managers as
leadership developers
In the midst of the Battle of El Alamein in 1942, Montgomery
found time to telephone General Horrocks, one of his top
operational leaders and a newly appointed corps commander,
and give him a tutorial on leading at that level. For Monty had
observed that Horrocks had been reverting to being a divisional
general. All good leaders are also teachers.
A leader’s responsibility for individual needs – that third
area of need – includes developing the individual’s potential
– both professional and technical and in the ‘human side of
enterprise’. That entails one-to-one meetings at regular intervals
to offer constructive criticism, as well as encouragement or
support.
Above team level (and some would say even at team level) all
leaders are ‘leaders of leaders’, as was said about Alexander the
Great. Good leaders will use their one-to-one opportunities –
formal or informal – to share their knowledge of leadership in a
conversational but effective way. It is, if you like, the apprentice
approach to learning leadership, and its necessary condition
is mutual respect. It is that mutual trust or respect that makes
us both eager to learn and ready to teach. You need a system of
setting objectives and appraising performance – part of action centred leadership – but it won’t be complete unless it is seen as
a channel for two-way learning.

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