What about the leadership of your managers? Is leadership “bumping along”? Is there resistance or conflict? Do you think to yourself: “Are they ready yet?” Networking and customer loyalty only depend on a few, at C-level? Quality, turnover or margin don’t fit?
So you need a leadership development program. You give some training and coaching and tell the bosses and the bosses’ bosses to do their job and drive people on! Is that sufficient, effective and good? Perhaps yes, great things can happen with experienced bosses and chief executives.
We believe we can do even better – clearer, more focused, more systematic, more structured, more efficient and faster. More stringently aligned with your goals (growth, quality, economic results, etc.). And with a higher ROI for your investment in leadership development.
Success factors in leadership development
In our experience, leadership development must take the following aspects into account in order to be successful:
- Have clarity about the leadership skills that are relevant to you. You can only bring about change if you know where you want to go.
- The leadership skills you select should be consistently aligned with the goals of your company.
- Only a multifactorial view of leadership competencies can do justice to the complexity of leadership and the diversity of your leadership personality and really contribute to the goals of your company. In other words: 2-4 seemingly simple dimensions of leadership are not sufficiently differentiated.
- Your leadership competencies must be complete, i.e. aspects of self-leadership (e.g. emotional intelligence, tenacity), team leadership (e.g. coaching, empowering), organizational leadership (visionary thinking, change orientation) and networking (customers, alliances …) must be taken into account.
- When selecting leadership competencies, you should be guided bylong-established frameworks that have been scientifically proven. It is neither necessary nor helpful to invent the wheel yourself.
- Creates an objective framework for the individual assessment of a manager’s strengths and weaknesses along these leadership competencies. The assessments and recommendations of higher-level managers are often individually shaped and emotionally influenced, which limits their validity and acceptance.
- A quantitatively reliable analysis of leadership skills from a self- and external perspective(360°), which is also benchmarked against a large sample of successful managers outside your company, is ideal.
- Your leadership development process must focus on deep, sustainable development of leadership and personality . Superficial changes in behavior (“playing theater”) may bring the individual manager the desired promotion, but the company is no closer to its goals.
- This sustainability and depth are only possible if analyses and your leadership development process give your managers starting points for deeper change . The results of the analysis must make it possible for the leader to see what is happening beneath the surface, what really drives him or her: fun, joy, motivation, but also beliefs, disappointments, concerns and fears, personal and professional stress, and resilience. We call all of this psychodynamics. This is where real change in leadership occurs.
- This in turn means that openness, acceptance and trust are necessary among managers. Your leadership development process must be consistently separated from assessment and incentivization.
- On the basis of such a well-founded assessment, your management development can include training measures and individual development measures .
- If necessary, this can be combined with the processing of topics at team level to leverage the potential for joint development in a safe space. This will also strengthen and further develop your leadership culture.
Your leadership skills – an assessment of where you stand
Structured, focused leadership development is a long-term task for your company itself, for your HR departments and experts and for your higher-level managers (C-level). This is where the responsibility and control should lie.
The central component of your program is a well-founded assessment of your leadership skills, which you can carry out in the following steps:
- Check the applicability of established frameworks for leadership competencies to your company. Analyze how which competencies contribute to the company’s success.
We like to use the dimensions of kdvi’s Global Executive Leader Mirror with our clients. This tool is comprehensive, focused on corporate goals and success, scientifically based, contains 360° benchmarking and provides insights into the deeper background of thinking and behavior (psychodynamics).
(c) Kets de Vries Institute, https://kdvi.com/global-executive-leadership-mirror-gelm/ - Defines a systematic procedure for carrying out a location assessment (see illustration), e.g:
- Communicating leadership skills and procedures to managers
- Conducting the analysis incl. 360° at the desired management level ideally by all managers (approx. 4-6 weeks)
- Individual de-briefing of the results with each manager. For reasons of confidentiality, we strongly recommend using external experts/coaches (approx. 2-3 hours per manager)
- As part of the de-briefing, individual agreement with the manager and external consultant as to which topics, development needs and desired measures and changes are communicated to the company (HR, higher-level manager) (confidentiality).
- At the same time, an analysis is carried out at an aggregated level for general weaknesses in certain dimensions, other recurring themes, etc. (by the external consultant).
- Coordination of these observations with the superior manager or HR. (workshop of 2-4 h). Decision on measures, e.g. individual coaching and training options, team coaching, training for the entire team or other derived measures (e.g. organization, processes, communication, decision-making processes, etc.).
- Debriefing workshop for the managers themselves with feedback on the aggregated results (general weaknesses, topics, observations) and the measures proposed by the higher-level management and HR. Refinement, coordination, decision
- You may want to pilot this process of determining the current situation with the higher-level management or top management. In this way, you create understanding and acceptance, act as a role model and, of course, also enable the higher-level management to develop further.
- After piloting the assessment, you should define a robust roadmap for the future implementation and further development of the leadership development program. We recommend an assessment every 12 to 18 months in line with the above-mentioned process model. Coaching and training measures are carried out continuously on the basis of the assessment.
Our recommendation
Our recommendation is simple. Ask yourself the following questions – if you are not satisfied with your answers, you know where and how you can further develop your leadership development process. Or simply give me a call for an open discussion.
- The first question is simple – do you even have an issue? Are you satisfied with the leadership in your organization? With the cooperation? With trust, communication, dealing with conflicts, the culture? Do the results fit? If not, what changes would you like to see?
- If you are striving for change – how clearly are your leadership competencies defined? The goals of leadership development? How were they derived? From an individual perspective or across the board, scientifically based? With benchmarking? Individually defined or consistent across the organization? How do your leadership competencies match your goals?
- How well do you know where your managers stand in the various dimensions? Individual qualitative assessment of strengths and weaknesses in the context of evaluation/incentivization?
- How clear is it to you what measures you initiate when you see deviations ? Responsibility of the higher-level manager, ad hoc measures? Responsibility of HR and answered with training?
As a suggestion – your pilot of a modernized, optimized leadership development can look like this:
On our own behalf
Contact us if you would like input or a review of your leadership development tools and processes. We also offer the assessment process described above at a fixed price, scaling with the number of managers. Directly applicable, without administrative effort on your part, with a high impact – we promise!