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Recently I was asked how organizations with limited resources can take action to develop great leaders. Having spent some of my career working in organizations with lean budgets, but that wanted to build a culture of strong, effective leadership, I had some ideas to share with that audience.
There’s an obvious question: WHY NOT JUST HIRE PROVEN LEADERS? This would allow a company to benefit immediately from their wisdom. There’s also a long-term dividend: Great leaders create more great leaders. Earnest young professionals who observe strong leadership in action, tend to learn from and emulate those behaviors. The result: a workforce of people who’ve learned to motivate, focus, and energize each other.
And hiring proven leadership capability to fill the key roles in an organization can be expensive. Businesses must be profitable to be sustainable, and that means a full complement of proven leaders may not be within an organization’s fiscal capability. Yet, effective leadership is no less important to their long-term success than it is to organizations with deeper pockets.
How can lean companies honor their fiscal reality, yet take strong steps to create a leadership culture that is a custom fit to its vision, mission, and values? Keep reading.
START YOUR VERY OWN LEADERSHIP FORUM. Get your current and potential future leaders learning about and discussing effective leadership in a company-sponsored setting. Identify some people within the organization who want to develop their leadership capabilities. Then, have them meet each month to share what they are learning as leaders.
Why will this idea work? People who want to develop as leaders will gladly provide ideas and energy to keep the meetings relevant. People who want to demonstrate healthy leadership behaviors within your organization are highly engaged: they have trained their awareness on the challenges your organization faces and have already put some good thought into how the challenges might best be surmounted.
Not only will your organization benefit from some great ideas, but also the senior person who facilitates this group will learn something of each member’s potential to succeed in future positions of greater responsibility as they observe the group’s interactions and listen to their ideas. That translates to the ability to make better staffing decisions in the future.
SETTING UP YOUR OWN LEADERSHIP FORUM FOR SUCCESS
Here are eight things to consider in launching a successful Leadership Forum:
Assess employees’ and job applicants’ interest in their own leadership development – not to penalize those who don’t express interest, but to help identify forum participants.
Create and protect a small amount of time – even 45 minutes once per month is a good starting point – for selected employees to participate.
Recruit a seasoned manager or executive who is willing to facilitate, but not dominate. Light facilitation keeps each meeting focused without imposing a point of view or discouraging a number of helpful perspectives.
Ensure that every team or department within the organization is represented.
Assign easy homework, like “spend fifteen minutes reading one article or watching one video about the leadership topic we’ll be discussing.” Many online resources provide low cost/no cost access to leadership material. This way, participants come with fresh ideas to contribute.
Take every participant’s contribution seriously. No person should feel ignored or marginalized. To practice this sort of inclusiveness, in fact, is an important aspect of healthy leadership.
Create a shared document to summarize conversations for future reference.
Find a team, project, or initiative for each participant to lead – something that will require them to communicate, coordinate, and motivate. Leadership is not an intellectual exercise; it is profoundly practical and personal.
GIVE YOUR EMERGING LEADERS PRACTICE. The 19th century Englishman Charles Spurgeon said, “Wisdom is the right use of knowledge,” meaning that head knowledge alone does not make one “wise.” Wisdom involves applying knowledge in life situations. Leadership wisdom is like that – it comes through practice. Assign each participant something, even a small something, that requires them to motivate, communicate with, and coordinate the activities of others.
Consider: I can read the best books and watch the best videos on golf: How to develop a swing; the difference between hitting irons and woods; how to read a green depending on whether it’s wet or dry; the best mental and emotional approach to the game. But to get good at golf, I need to practice. A lot!
Learning leadership is the same way because people’s attitudes, emotions, passions, hopes, and fears are always involved. Great leaders have even learned to deal with their own internal baggage as they strive to bring forth the best efforts, creativity, and cooperation of others.
Match every person who will participate in your Leadership Forum to the right opportunities to practice. Having people speak from these experiences will enrich the conversations they have when they’re together.
GIVE YOUR EMERGING LEADERS OWNERSHIP AND LET THEM STEER. People who want to grow as leaders will happily spend some time learning from the many good no-cost or low-cost resources available to them. And since cooperation and teaming behaviors are hallmarks of effective organizational leadership, your leadership forum members should already possess a high motivation for all who participate in your leadership forum to succeed in their journey.
There are many ways to keep the meetings interesting and relevant. For instance, allow participants to propose and vote on topics of their choice in advance so the group feels ownership. Conversations will be highly relevant to your organization, since all members of the group are immersed in some aspect of its daily operations. The conversations will benefit from a number of valid perspectives as participants read and learn from different materials. Consider rotating some of the meeting topic selection and presentation responsibilities among forum members so that all have an opportunity to contribute their best ideas and insights that can move the organization forward. Light-touch facilitation from the senior person who is sponsoring the forum keeps the meetings productive and orderly.
SO… WHEN DO I CALL CONSULTANTS AND COACHES FOR HELP? At some point, homegrown solutions like the one I’ve suggested may reach the limits of their usefulness in pushing your leadership culture forward. Unhelpful phenomena such as groupthink or hero-worship, which focus participants on a narrow set of ideas that can exclude valuable insights, can eventually seep into internal-only initiatives and hamper their effectiveness. And – as organizations grow larger, more complex leadership and management challenges surface. That’s when leadership coaches and consultants are a great investment.
Meanwhile, start reaping the benefits that accrue by taking simple steps to make leadership development a real part of company culture.
CALL TO ACTION: If you can support the investment, leadership coaches and consultants can be transformative. Hiring a team of proven leaders can provide a great jump start. If sound financial management excludes either of those approaches, you still have the most important resource at your disposal: your people. Through them, you can still take meaningful steps to build a strong leadership culture in the near term. It can happen with little or no impact on the financial statements. So, start somewhere. Start now. You can do this!
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