To do this Leadership Development series justice we have to cut through noise and nonsense. I have just searched on the internet for ‘what is leadership’ and received 2,130,000,000 results. That says to me there are lots of people asking that specific question or there’s a lot of ‘stuff’ out there purporting to answer that question. This clouds the issue, and more importantly, leads to organisations following the latest fads and trends in this area, and our simple search shows that there are many of these out there.
As a developer of leaders with over 30 years' experience, I strongly believe organisations need to go back to basics and ask themselves a few fundamental questions – firstly, “In terms of delivering our strategy, tactics or plans what do we want our people in leadership roles to do?” and secondly, "How do we want them to do it?”
In my experience, to make this work, organisations need to clearly define their leadership roles and as such the population they need to develop. They need to identify how developing this population will enable them to deliver on key business imperatives, goals and objectives.
From there, they need to define the skills, capabilities and knowledge required to deliver these critical KPI’s. Therefore, defining in their own organisational terms “What is leadership for their organisation”. Until organisations follow these basic principles, they will continue to deliver programmes that scratch the surface, instead of delivering real value for the organisation and the individual.
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