Have you recently promoted people to a leadership role, but don’t know how to develop them?

Do you have challenges with your middle and senior leaders, in terms of culture alignment that you want to address?

Would you want to engage your middle and senior leadership in a tenured learning path, but cannot enrol them into an EDP due to the offsite duration of the program?

Are you grappling with myriad team of leaders, each with a different exposure and background, and want to align them to the company culture?

Ever thought of developing your middle and senior leadership in order to grow and transform the organisation?

Most of the times whenever I have interacted with the CEOs or the Head of HRs of various organisations on “leadership development” issues, the concerns have always been around getting the leaders to “let go” of their previous work ways and “adopt” the leadership mantle. The same, of course, get articulated in a myriad of different concern statements - understanding the leader’s roles & responsibilities; journey from a “high performing team member” to an effective team leader; developing leadership skills of change management, coaching and mentoring, problem solving; building leadership capability around emotional intelligence, conceptual thinking, building trust and loyalty; creating and sustaining the organisation vision and values, and creating a performance driven organisation…

The list goes on…

So, how do you develop your leaders?

Typically, most organisations (and I admit, I have been a party to this too) get into a piecemeal approach. So, it is either an SDP (self development program based on internal assessment or a glorified way of collective count of ticks on an excel file listing of competencies) linked standalone workshops on topics like “Strategic Thinking,” “Change Management,” “Coaching and Mentoring,” “Decision Making,” etc., or, if they have money to spend and people can be taken out for long durations, it is sponsoring of a select lot of leaders to the crème de la crème management institutes’ “Managerial Development Programs.”

The latter is, usually, expensive, plus removes the leaders from their workplace for a long duration, while the former is piecemeal and part effective, at best.

Is there an effective way to develop leaders, within a manageable budget, and without displacing the team?

Let us look more closely at the leadership competencies. A leader’s role can be divided into three large areas:

1. Leadership capabilities
a. Systems thinking – the big picture
b. Focused and Disciplined
c. Emotional intelligence
d. Trust and loyalty influencer
e. The “Blue Ocean” strategist

2. Leadership skills
a. Change management
b. Communication
c. Conflict resolution and collaboration
d. Coaching & mentoring
e. Decision making

3. Leadership responsibilities
a. Creating the vision
b. Articulating and operationalising values
c. Creating the organisation culture
d. Sharing and leveraging knowledge
e. Motivating the team
f. Producing results
g. Building leaders for tomorrow

If the above is what the entire portfolio of an effective leader looks like, then, logically, the leadership development task must take into account all of the above.

Usually, a lot of SDP workshops, on a calendar framing, try and address one or more of the above competencies and, hence, fail miserably to develop and instead end up as a “good but difficult to implement” learning. These interventions fail to address the basic underlying tenet – development must begin from understanding the core!

So what is at the core of leadership development, and how does one build from it?

Let us stay with the above competencies for leadership development. Is there another logical way of combining these, which allows for a developmental framework?

One of the ways to that, is to look at the above list as a mix of three triads:

• Aligning self and the team to the organisation culture – the potion of vision, mission and values; understanding self and others – the behaviour types; Living the Values; leading from the front - Walk the Talk
  We call this the Triad of Leading Self - “Personal Mastery”
• Understanding, managing and building team member capabilities; Building and executing developmental plans; managing conflict, inspiring a shared vision, and encouraging the heart; Creating a high performance climate; Working as a team
  We call this the Triad of Leading Team - “Team Mastery”
• Understanding the changing landscape and building strategy; Achieving business success by aligning teams and collaborating with external partners; Delivering customer delight
  We call this the Triad of Leading Business - “Business Mastery”

Given the above segmentation of the competencies, let us define the principles of an effective leadership development program are:

1. Any holistic leadership development, whether for first time leaders or for existing leaders with different exposures, must address the above Triads if it is to deliver consistent results. Ideally, it should move from

Personal mastery –> Team mastery –> Business mastery,  or
Leading Self –> Leading Team –> Leading Business

2. The training inputs must result in a practical, time-bound action plan, to allow from workplace implementation of the learning.

3. The measures or the program outcomes must reflect in changes to the leadership profile (various instruments that can give a 360o), to the organisation culture (again, multiple culture mapping tools exist), and finally to the organisation or business performance measures. These measures could be

a. Reduced attrition
b. Implementation of innovative work practices
c. Customer satisfaction scores
d. Impact on financial parameters, like
i. Cost efficiencies
ii. Revenues etc.

4. The leadership program must be specific and customised to the organisation’s needs and its DNA

ODA – Lead@Work® – The Leadership Development Program

At ODA, we believe, Leadership, succinctly defined, is the ability, and the will, to lead people to a common purpose. It is the leaders’ ability to empower, coach, motivate, inspire, influence, leverage synergy, and transform that creates the sustainable source of differentiation for the organisation. It is the leaders’ task to articulate and establish a compelling vision and mission, build a climate that enables innovation and superior performance, display superior foresight and decision making, and empower and develop future leaders.

Our leadership development program is based on a belief that “leadership is everyone’s business”. It’s about the practices leaders use to transform values into actions, visions into realities, obstacles into innovations, separateness into solidarity, and risks into rewards. It’s about a climate in which people turn challenging opportunities into remarkable successes. These leaders become the source of inspiration and possibility, and they show conviction in every action that they take.

They create an energy field, ignite the minds of followers, and build teams and organisations for a lifetime and beyond.

How does it work?

Lead@Work® is a 12 month engaged program, broken up into a trimester framework of:

1. Pre-measurement

a. This uses profiling tools
i. Leadership profile (360o)
ii. Culture mapping

b. This pre-measurement gives us an insight into the individual profile, areas of strengths and   development, and the individual and organisation value maps.

c. Apart from this we also do a Social Network Analysis (SNA) to map the hidden organisation, and look at the “leader as a hub” map.

2. Training intervention

a. This is a 3-days offsite Outbound Training program, which deals with one Triad at a time
b. Some of tools that we use within the workshops
i. Enneagram personality types
ii. Belbin team roles

c. Each workshop is a mix of models, games and activities to draw powerful insights into developing self as an effective leader

d. We also identify leaders who will need additional support through executive coaching

3. On-the-job workplace project

a. This is related to the learning in the previous Triad and its implementation at the workplace, every trimester

b. We involve key stakeholders as implementation guides and evaluators for the projects

c. This phase has a very strong business outcomes as it deals with implementation of critical actions around culture building, team management, people development, and work process innovation

4. Post-measurement

a. In this step, we do measurement on the same profiling tools, to look at the developmental change brought about through the program

b. Business measures, like attrition and productivity, are also mapped to measure program effectiveness

Can it be customised for an organisation?

The Lead@Work® program is a customised, organisation specific program.
It is linked to the following:

1. Core organisation values

2. Aligned leadership competencies

Each intervention is then mapped to addressing and impacting specific core values or leadership competencies.

To know more about the Lead@Work®, and to work with us to build an effective, customised leadership development program for your organisation, please get in touch with us.

Written by Rajat Rakheja.