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.