Many organisations gear their professional development budgets toward senior leadership positions. This is despite the knowledge that by the time people get to these levels, many of their leadership behaviours are well entrenched (including the bad ones). Far too often, new and emerging leaders are left to learn how to develop themselves, mirroring the leadership behaviours of those around them and navigating the complexity of new contexts alone.
This sink-or-swim approach to emerging leadership within organisations doesn’t just impact the individual – it is the teams they manage and broader organisational performance that also suffer.
While experienced leaders are usually willing to share their knowledge to benefit others, leaving good leadership development to chance is a risk not worth taking. The most effective contemporary leadership programs are taking the best of what’s offered to senior executives and applying it at team leader and middle-management levels.
We asked four former senior executives to share some of their insights on enhancing a leader’s performance and that of their teams:
Understand Thinking Preferences and Leverage Diversity of Thought
Leading a uniform team that think like us, might appear to be an easy option, but it rarely produces the kinds of results that set the world on fire. Encouragingly, more and more organisations are investing in diversity and inclusion initiatives to support their people to feel safe, supported and valued, but how does that play out at the team level? For new and emerging leaders, it can be difficult to know how to leverage the thinking power of diverse teams. Using models such as Herrmann’s Whole Brain Thinking®, leaders can better understand how to bring people with different thinking preferences together to produce a quantifiable performance uplift.
Invest in Your Leadership Legacy
Many leaders only start thinking about their leadership legacy when they are much closer to the end of their careers than the beginning. By this time the legacy (and reputation) of a leader is often well established. When new and emerging leaders take time to think about it early in their careers, they have the opportunity to make more deliberate choices. These choices build the foundation for their future reputation, and leaders are much more likely to view their actions and decisions as an investment in their legacy.
Engage Constructively with Decision-makers
Though the word bureaucracy is used as a slur by some people, the systems of administration that govern public and private organisations are necessary realities. Learning how to engage with these administrative processes, and the decision-makers and other authorities within them, is a critical skill for leaders who wish to have an impact in the longer term – especially if the desired impact is to encourage the systems themselves to evolve.
Discover Resilient Leadership
Resilient systems – whether they are teams, individuals, or networks – have some common components which allow them to detect, respond, recover and adapt when something threatens to damage them. For leaders, applying that understanding to themselves and their teams, supports an environment in which everyone can thrive and produce exceptional results.
Plan Your Career
Few experienced leaders have managed to entirely avoid the trap of accidentally following someone else’s path at some point in their career. This can look like blindly pursuing the path that our mentor took, or constraining our options by legends about the ‘ideal’ path to success in a particular organisation. But someone else’s path isn’t necessarily ideal for everyone – even if their goals look the same. It’s never too early for leaders to start thinking about what success means to them, distinct from the definitions imposed by others. It’s especially important to start thinking about what role fulfilment will play in a career journey. Bringing these elements together can support leaders to design a career path that is ideal for them, and is much more likely to result in a genuinely rewarding and sustainable career over the longer term.
Network Purposefully
Despite the common sentiment that “it’s lonely at the top”, great leadership should be a highly collaborative activity. The greatest achievements of any leader often rely on mutually supportive relationships. Though the idea of investing deliberately in building operational, personal and strategic networks can be daunting for many, it is critically important. Learning how to leverage those networks for mutual benefit can ensure personal, organisational and mission success.
Having the right support to develop these approaches and skills is a must. To learn more about how The OPS (Operational, Personal, Strategic) Program can support you as a leader, or the development of your leadership team, visit us here.
