Leadership Development 4 - The How

All the pieces of your leadership development program are now in place. You have the right candidates, the right mentors and the carefully crafted content built out from your corporate context ready to go. The only thing left to do is execute.

Demographics

Who are your leadership candidates? What type of profile do they have relative to their experience, skill sets, diversity and capabilities? Chances are that you will have some millennials in the group, and they will need considerations that are most likely different than what you have done in the past. Karie Willyerd (@Angler) recently wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review, Millennials Want to be Coached at Work that indicated,

”Millennials have a greater self-esteem, but also have higher levels of anxiety, and a greater need for praise.”

While much has been written about this biggest demographic infiltrating the workplace, it is important to remember that millennials respond really well to direct support, are great in teams, and are adaptable, self‑directed learners. Leadership development will not be the only area within your organization that will need to adapt to this changing demographic. As the level of competition increases for the talent within this group, so will organizations need to accommodate.

Engagement

One of the keys to facilitating the growth of your leadership candidates, particularly the millennials, is to focus on engagement. Most of your current candidates have been self-directing their own learning for a long time. They have grown up with unlimited access to whatever interests them, which also means they have had the option, good or bad, to ignore things that do not. If you want your candidates to understand the quality corporate program that you have created, you will need to give them options to self-direct the “how”. While the destination is something that you have determined, how they demonstrate their understanding (the path) is something that they will need input into. If you are interested in wading deeper into ‘ways to engage millennials’ water; check out my blog Leading the New Followers.

Cohort Incubation

Most post-secondary institutions have figured out that their students perform better when they are part of a cohort. Students connected through small groups that facilitate discussions, exchange ideas, and take risks tend to do better than those that spend most of their time wading through new experiences and content by themselves. There will still be lots of independent work and responsibilities required, but the incubation aspect of working together will bring out the best in your leadership candidates. This cohort model also best represents the teamwork environment that the candidates will be leading at some point.

Adjustment Cycle

A well-crafted adjustment cycle that provides feedback will be a key component for all of your leadership candidates. It will be something that your millennials will be looking for, particularly if it utilizes formative assessment. Formative assessment lets them know how they are doing along the way prior to any summative or final assessment. This provides the candidate time to adapt and make adjustments, as well as the facilitator to do the same relative to the leadership content they are trying to share. This practice also instills in the candidates the need to constantly assess their own work relative to what it is they are responsible for, or what deliverables are required. Not only will this prove valuable in their own practice, but also, as leaders, they will instill the importance of assessing and adjusting in the people they are leading.

Scalable

One of the requirements for the second year of my masters program was to write a paper on a particular aspect of leadership. Having completed something similar during the first year, and being an optimist, I asked my facilitator if we could pull some of the ideas from the first paper to use in the current one. He responded by saying, “Anything you develop, you should use at least three times”. His message was that if the ideas are sound and the application is relevant, use it. Our time is too valuable to either reinvent the wheel or work on things that have no real value. Connect with different groups within your organization like Finance, HR or IT, and ask them about their current challenges relative to leadership. Nothing will engage your leadership candidates more than working on actual problems in real time where there is potential to make a genuine impact.

One of the most valuable aspects of my master’s work was that I started it and my leadership position at the same time. It was like a leadership lab, allowing me to execute leadership theory right away, producing all kinds of feedback, both positive and negative. However you design your leadership development program, make it meaningful. The time and effort you put in are too valuable to have your good people working on things that are either trivial or fictional.

Making the choice to establish a leadership development program is the first step in supporting the long-term health and growth of your organization. The second, and more significant step, is investing the time and resources to do it correctly.

Mike MacDonald