For organizations wanting to minimize the stresses of leadership in flux, now is the time to build a leadership pipeline focused on these four critical areas.
by Nanette Miner
September 9, 2021
Right at the start, professional training, learning and development made a misstep. At the time workplace training and L&D was being formalized in the mid-1900s, people were segmented and siloed within their organizations in terms of the professional development opportunities they were offered.
For example, if you joined an organization in a finance role, and you were lucky enough to be provided professional development opportunities, those opportunities would likely solely be within the field of finance. As a result, corporate L&D has produced huge cadres of specialists, but very few generalists.
Moreover, the skills that many consider to be leadership skills are typically only taught to someone after they are promoted to a leadership role, requiring a new leader to be accountable for new functional outputs as well as new interpersonal skills, which is often a burdensome expectation.
If you’d like to successfully get in front of the leadership transition that is about to occur, before the last group of boomers retire by the end of this decade, there are four key concepts you must start teaching now to have well-rounded leaders in your future leader pipeline:
- Personal development
- Interpersonal development
- Business acumen
- Next-level learning
Here’s a brief look into each of these topical areas and why they are important.
Personal development. We have heard a lot about emotional intelligence in the last few years, and the need for leaders to uber-possess this quality. Unfortunately, typical workplace practices such as the competition for promotions and the type of outputs “graded” in-performance reviews often surmount the development of EQ. In general, we default to explaining what EQ is, but fall short of helping people develop it.
In addition to being able to manage oneself, there are other personal capabilities a future leader should demonstrate, such as being able to work collaboratively across the organization, communicating well in both writing and speaking and being able to independently look for opportunities to expand one’s capabilities, such as through volunteering. Personal development is critical to working with others, as well as to working independently, and will only become more important as a broader work-from-home culture takes hold.
Interpersonal development. Interpersonal skills are the lifeblood of organizations; without them work simply doesn’t get done. However, we make a huge assumption in believing that everyone in our organization knows, for example, how to work cooperatively, understands how teams form and perform or is able to agreeably come to consensus. These are fundamental workplace skills that everyone should possess, and we assume people in leadership roles do possess, but rarely are they purposefully developed in our workforces below the leadership level.
Business acumen. As I mentioned, those of us in professional training and L&D have created masses of specialists and very few — if any — business generalists, unless the employee is a chosen “hi-po,” and there are very few organizations that utilize this developmental model. It is critical that we develop future leaders’ business acumen, or organizations risk suffering irretractable mistakes made by leaders who lack a full perspective of how the organization operates, makes money, keeps money or hedges against risk.
Understanding organizational finances is one important aspect, as are the concepts of continuous improvement, competitive intelligence, project management — the list goes on. Typically, organizations reserve these kinds of topics for people in operations, but why? What is the benefit of isolating increased performance? You don’t need an organization full of PMPs , but it is exceedingly beneficial for everyone in the organization to understand how projects are conceived, teamed, scheduled and monitored. Likewise, think of the money your organization could save, or generate, if everyone had a basic understanding of continuous improvement and was on the lookout for opportunities within their own role.
Next-level learning. “Next-level learning” is a term I invented. It encompasses the knowledge and skills we presume a leader possesses, especially in the executive ranks, but that we rarely purposefully teach to our up-and-coming leaders — things like, but not limited to, assessing risk, planning strategy, behaving ethically or polarity thinking.
Many of these capabilities in the “next-level” category are learned through experience and reflection. For instance, it’s not very effective to teach the “concept” of ethics, it’s more impactful and results in deeper learning to experience an ethical dilemma and have to reason through the best course of action. Building the ability to think through a situation from multiple angles (i.e., how will this impact our people, our finances, our reputation in the industry?) and arrive at a well-reasoned, defensible decision is not achieved quickly or easily. We need to start building capabilities in this realm early in people’s careers so that they possess these capabilities before ascending to leadership roles.
There are a number of demographic shifts happening in the business environment today and for the foreseeable future. For organizations to minimize the stresses of leadership in flux, now is the time to build a leadership pipeline focused on these four critical areas.