Understanding the nature of leadership is critical to succeeding in your efforts to develop it. Whilst academics continue to debate what leadership actually is, management expert – the late Peter Drucker stated that the only definition of a leader is someone who has followers.  

This simple yet potent definition tells us a lot about what is involved in leadership. Leaders achieve their results through influencing the actions and attitudes of other people. Staff achieve results through their own actions and their responsibility finishes with making sure they did their best work. It has been said however that a leader should not be judged by their own actions but rather by what those around them are doing. People are the work of leaders.

With a central focus on influencing others, it is easy to understand that leadership is about who you are as a person and what you habitually do. Leadership development therefore is personal development that must go beyond knowing what to do, and instead guide to leaders doing what they know back within their workplaces.

Leadership occurs in a social context and do the most effective forms of leadership development. Books and readings are useful to a point and so too is e–learning.  Yet neither is sufficient on its own.

For a comprehensive, evidence-based yet practical overview of what is known about effective leadership read our article An Overview of Knowledge on Effective Leadership.

Two forms of leadership development continue to dominate how we try to develop leaders. Both are useful in helping leaders know what to do, yet neither is sufficient on its own to bring about behavioural change or the wisdom and judgement that come from experience.

The classic MBA style program is quite useful in introducing its students to the world of business that many managers operate in, improving a leader’s knowledge about accounting, economics, law, marketing and strategic positioning. If that is what you are after, we recommend that you complete an MBA.

MBAs have also started to bring some rigour into our knowledge about people through the field of organizational behaviour. Yet, MBAs, on their own, do not develop your ability to turn enhanced knowledge into behaviours that spark committed actions from those you lead. Achieving sustained behavioural change requires something different to the traditional academic business model.

The business school model has also been criticised for dividing knowledge into compartmentalised disciplines, whilst practising managers are expected to integrate knowledge:

·         Across disciplines

·         With wisdom and action.

The second dominant form of leadership development is event-style workshops and training. Typically these are more practical and experiential than academic programs, although this is not always the case.

Like the business school model, the event approach to leadership development, on its own, is not effective in helping leaders to make sustained behavioural change within their day-to-day activities. Leaders leave armed with good intentions. Sometimes they even start doing things a bit differently. Yet, amidst the many demands on a leader each day, it is not long before old habits creep back in and things go back to the way they were.

Furthermore, it is estimated there are over 35,000 books and articles written on leadership – some with little or no evidence base at all. Given how hard it is to develop new leadership behaviours, I remain amazed that individuals and organizations alike will jump at the chance to attend programs that have the latest management buzz word. A prime example is emotional intelligence, which in its true form has solid links to leadership effectiveness. Yet many commercial books and programs promote so-called emotional intelligence techniques that not only have no grounding in evidence, they even promote techniques that run counter to what true emotional intelligence means.   

The learning ladder provides a useful metaphor for the behavioural style of learning involved in leadership development. Your goal is to make it to the top rung of the ladder unconscious competence, where your new leadership behaviours are so ingrained that you just do them without even thinking about it. You can start on any of the rungs beneath, but for simplicity let us assume you start on the bottom rung, unconscious incompetence. This is where you simply don’t know what you don’t know. You can move up to the second rung of the ladder conscious incompetence, by finding out what you don’t currently know. You can do this through reading about leadership or at a more personal level, gathering some feedback on how you are perceived as a leader. Now that you know what you need to do, you step up to the third rung of the ladder, conscious competence. This is that clumsy, awkward stage that most people could remember experiencing when they first learnt to drive a car. It is only through practice and ongoing refinement that leaders make a successful step to the top rung of the ladder, conscious competence. When this occurs you are ready to find another aspect of your leadership to improve. Real leadership development is lifelong process.

Whilst the learning ladder provides a very useful analogy for the steps involved in behavioural learning, it fails to highlight one critical point. When undertaking the step from conscious competence to unconscious competence, behaviour actually gets worse before it gets better. A golfer who goes to a coach in order to correct a slice will find the new techniques awkward at first and their score may even get worse for a while. This is also true when experimenting with new leadership behaviours. The steep learning curve is only half the story. Expect your effectiveness to drop before it increases. This is important to note because you need to:

¨      Not give up just because it doesn’t work, or work as well as your existing behaviours in the first few attempts.

¨      Choose to experiment only in situations where you can afford a little bit of failure.

¨      Plan ways to keep your learning progressing, beyond this workshop.

The good news is that there are proven ways to help leaders make sustained behavioural enhancements within their workplace. These methods are outlined below and are even more effective when the right people have been selected to be developed.

Achieving behavioural change is hard work. To succeed we recommend that leaders focus on only 1-3 goal areas at any given time.

When choosing which areas to develop, you should assess:

·         Your existing strengths and weaknesses to identify areas of developmental need.

·         Which of these developmental needs, if improved, will have the largest affect on your leadership impact.

You may already be aware of developmental needs, however for most leaders formal assessment processes are an important starting point for what will be 6-12 month journey, with lots of practice along the way. This may include one or more of the following:

·         Psychometric self assessments such as the CPI260, the FIRO-B and the TKI.

·         360 degree feedback processes.

·         Performance reviews and appraisals.

You can also use assessment to focus leadership development at collective levels.

Once you know what aspects of your leadership you intend to develop, it is time to plan how you will do so. Research indicates that on-the-job experiences, coupled with executive coaching and journaling are some of the most effective and popular ways to bring about behavioural change.

·         You should seek out on-the-job experiences that stretch you within your goal area.

·         You can use your coach to hold you accountable for actioning agreed behaviours, to help you explore ways forward when confronted with a challenge and to debrief significant events.

·         You can try out our new leadership journaling software for free.

This can be supported but not driven by more traditional readings and coursework.

It is also worth finding and using a competency mentor – someone who is good at the specific goal area you wish to develop.

Include Sources of Support & Challenge

If you have ever made New Year’s resolutions or started or a diet, then you understand that forming new habits takes more than just good intentions. You need to plan to include different strategies that will act as sources of both support and challenge along the way.

We have already mentioned two of the most powerful strategies – coaching and journaling.

However, you can also use the people around you – staff, colleagues, your boss and even your family. Start by telling them you goals and letting them know you would like their support as you try to form some new habits. Each week, choose someone who can give some informal feedback on any changes they are seeing and the impact of those changes. It needs to be someone who is in a position to see you in action first hand. You can use other people as sounding boards and even cheerleaders. We all like to succeed and sharing your little successes along the way with your family can be a big help.

Set, periodic discussions with your boss (eg once a month) are also useful.