How to grow leaders in your organisation

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 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:

o   importance – it really has to matter;

o   longer-term – it takes time to grow trees;

o   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 organization 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 half-true – 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 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.

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 winwin situation. A 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.

Principle six: culture

Wellington and Nelson, Slim and Montgomery – yes, the armed services do grow leaders. They select and train for leadership, but their real secret is that since the 18th century they place a high value on leadership. They have a culture where it is valued at all levels. Above all, it is expected from all officers. The motto of Sandhurst expresses the ideal that is expected from every officer: Serve to Lead. Values are the stars your organisation steers by and together they define your distinctive ethos. Make sure your culture comes to place a high value on ‘good leadership and leadership for good’. In the final analysis, it is culture that grows leaders, so it is vital to review it and make changes where necessary.

Corporate culture should also encourage a climate of selfdevelopment in leadership. Organisations only have 50 per cent of the cards in their hands; the other 50 per cent are in the hands of the individual. There may be no leadership courses available to you, but you can still learn leadership. Books are the best method, together with reflection on your own experience. Perhaps your organisation needs a motto too. How about the Latin motto of the United Kingdom’s Chartered Institute of Management, Ducere est Servire – To Lead is To Serve?

Principle seven: the chief executive

The seven generic functions of a strategic leader make it crystal clear that if you are in the role of chief executive you own the problem of growing leaders. Human resources or training specialists are there to advise and help. They can assist you to formulate and implement your strategy, but you are in the driving seat. If not, don’t expect any forward movement.

Apart from taking responsibility for the strategy, you should also be leading it from the front yourself. Be known to talk about leadership on occasion – not often but sometimes and always effectively. Visit any internal leadership courses and show your support for them. If you care about leadership, so will the organisation. Incidentally, it is also a chance to get your message across, as well as an opportunity to practise the skill of listening. Organisations today need listening leaders.

Finding greatness in people

In conclusion, developing future leaders is not a mystery. We know the laws of aerodynamics that undergird successful and sustained leadership development. The seven principles identified in this article are the foundations you are looking for, but it is up to you to apply them in the context of your

organisation’s needs and requirements.

So it is going to take you some time, effort and money. Why bother? The answer is simple. The tasks that face us are ever more challenging. In order to respond to them, people at all levels need effective and inspiring leaders. As John Buchan said, ‘The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.’