Leadership

Leadership Skill DevelopmentProducts Relating to 'Leadership Skill Development'

Do you think leadership skill development can happen through participating courses! There is a basic difference between Management and Leadership. Management is a role of what you do and leadership is a role of what you are. When planning leadership skill development initiatives, our general tendency is to first look for courses available.One of the scarcest capabilities, now and for the near future, is leadership. As organizations, their customers, their employees and their environment become more and more global, complex, and competitive and subject to rapid and fundamental change, the skill requirements for successful leadership are increasing fast.Most of the organizations would agree upon the fact that they currently have a shortage of leadership skill development talent; with the fear of how will they fare when the bar is continually being raised?One cannot define Leadership and therefore leadership skill development are more difficult to build and conveyed. Indeed, teaching leadership skills development at all is a question in itself for debate.Take a few seconds and reflect on what were the three most important contributors to your own development – as a professional and as a leader. If you are like most people, none of those three contributors was a course. One of our HR consultants our company has conducted this exercise with numerous groups of managers and executives across different branches in different continents. About one in 10 people mention a course – usually a very extensive and expensive 1-3 month executive development program. However over 90 percent of the items mentioned pertain to learning that occurred in the course of their work. Among the most common are being given responsibility for a major project – sometimes being thrown off the deep end, gaining experience in groups outside one s functional expertise, working on multi-disciplinary teams, working with customers, suppliers or strategic partners, working for a really good boss or a really bad one.An emerging trend in North American executive development is Action Learning – which has been well established in Europe for many years. It involves assigning groups of executives, with diverse backgrounds, to work on issues of strategic interest to their organization – with a facilitator to keep them on track and provide feedback. With focus on leadership skill development, the advantage of Action Learning is that it engages leaders and potential leaders in real work and a real work environment rather than a simulation.Part of fostering leadership skill development is encouraging and rewarding risk-taking. It is also giving these leaders, wherever they are in the organization, the opportunity to contribute to the development of the corporate strategies and plans. Leadership skill development comes with empowerment – employees cannot be leaders unless they have the power to take risks, make decisions, innovate and lead.

Leadership skill development can happen at all from within the person with commitment, focus and positive thinking.

Article Published: Thursday 21st December 2006