Leadership Development & Coaching. Because Leaders Deserve Support.

Most of the time when employees quit their job, they do not necessarily want to leave the company—they want to leave their boss. Likewise, excellent leadership inspires outstanding performance.

To become and to stay a good leader requires life-long learning and professional support. Whether you are engaging in ⇒ Strategic Change or want to move from "good" to "great"—the managers in your organization deserve leadership development in order to adapt, inspire, and succeed with their team.

Leadership Development rests on four pillars: training, individual coaching, succession planning with leadership assessments, and feedback systems. In addition to that, organizations have to build and maintain an infrastructure that is conducive to leadership excellence.

Training

Although there are some leadership skills that work across organizations, many are very specific to the culture, the industry, and the employees in a company. Custom-tailored leadership training is therefore key to successful leadership.

Even if you have set up basic leadership training, chances are that lateral or virtual leadership has become as prevalent in your organization as classical leadership. New generations of leaders also respond differently to forms of leadership training and request feedback- or action-based learning.

In addition to on-the-job support for high-potential employees your organization should sport a leadership curriculum that addresses leadership issues at different stages of development and encourages managers to engage in life-long learning.

Coaching

Do you remember that smart consultant who gave you excellent advice for your last problem? Coaching is not like that. Unlike business consulting, coaching does not solve your problems—it does you one better: it helps you solve your problems on your own.

Although managers learn many things from leadership training, some situations are very unique and require one-to-one support. A coach is someone who does not assume to know how to solve any issue, or to have answers to any question. Instead, he or she will guide the coachee through a step-by-step process of understanding the issue at hand, and developing strategies and skills to deal with them for good.

From a good coach you can expect more questions than answers, a goal-oriented approach and a non-judgmental and supportive attitude. Coaching should be made available to all managers at times of intensive personal development, stress, and changing organizational circumstances.

Succession Planning & Leadership Assessment

As you know, there are few worse things than not being able to satisfy a client's wish due to a lack of resources. Sustainable and rapid growth needs a pipeline of good people at the organizational nodes of your company. At the same time, there is nothing more costly and impeding than having the wrong person in an influential management position.

Succession planning means developing employees by keeping record of their developments and providing supportive career coaching. It should be a key responsibility for every manager in your organization. Additionally, you need to make sure that people are ready for the task ahead.

Thorough development assessments allow for an unbiased look at people and the management skills in high-potential employees, keeping them on track for a career within the organization. It gives candidates a committed outlook on their future career options and avoids the high costs of wrong decisions by both candidates and the organization.

Feedback Systems

To lead means to enable your team to achieve their collective goals. Teams want their managers to lead, but these leaders need help from their followers. One of the most important forms of this help is to provide leaders with honest feedback on what works and what does not, giving them opportunities to adapt and improve.

Power and influence make it hard in organizations to receive that feedback—costs and unpredictability of such frankness stop employees from telling their managers about their leadership performance. Consequently, you need systems in place to provide organization-wide, anonymous upward feedback.

If you have not yet done so, your organization should consider implementing multisource leadership feedback that is tied into existing or new reward systems. The implementation needs to be done carefully, convincing managers of the benefits of this feedback.

Leadership Infrastructure

When leadership development shows no significant impact on organizational performance, it is mostly structural obstacles that impede its success. Typical impediments are accounting or HR practices that penalize leadership efforts instead of rewarding them or misaligned workflows that consume otherwise great leadership.

Addressing structural barriers to great leadership means removing administrative bottlenecks, re-evaluating roles and positions, and creating a culture of leadership that is driven by rewards, open discussion and mentoring.