Leadership Development Process

Nurture the Leader Within

An introductory article about the process of leadership development. It explores three existing views on the subject, the general notion of born leaders, the management approach to leadership and self development approach of psychology.

Leaders are born

The field of leadership development has evolved over the time, even though leaders and leadership have existed since the birth of society. Traditionally, leaders were identified by their traits, behavior and how they handled critical situations. In an organization, the employees with leadership potential are usually identified as extroverts, with good communication and interpersonal skills. In contrast, individuals who lack in certain social and communication skills are deemed to be more suitable of positions other than leadership.

This is a consequence of long standing belief that leader are born and cannot be trained, essentially because it’s hard to change a person’s nature.

Leadership can be managed

As the organizations grew in both number and size, it was soon observed that even though certain individuals lacked the essentials traits of a leader, they were still very effective in certain roles and situations. Hence it gave birth to the idea that leadership can indeed be managed, by matching an individual’s skill with the tasks or situational analysis. At the same time, they acknowledged the limitations of such leaders; they become ineffective once the organization or task undergoes a change or transformation.

Most of the management studies have been focused on this particular aspect of leadership, essentially since it made leadership more scientific, it’s effectiveness in the organization could be predicted and controlled, a very desirable facet.

Leadership can be developed

The later advances in cognition and brain development lead to new belief among the psychologists that people learn new behaviors and traits during their life, thus it was unfair to people who were supposedly not born with leadership traits. Modern psychology emphasizes that through proper analysis and guidance, leadership can be nurtured. However, achieving it may require a lot of perseverance and determination, which makes it unpredictable, questioning its worth.

The leadership Development Process

A good leadership process needs to balance and utilize the strengths of all of the above mentioned theories while creating a practical and accountable process. While it is natural for various proponents and opponents of the theories to claim the strengths and weakness of each, the truth is that there is something useful in every one of them.

The following process diagram outlines our model of leadership development. The process is initiated by the need for leadership development, it has a phase of analyzing an individuals potential and formulating a development plan. The last phase deals with the execution of the plan with build-in adaptability to the process effectiveness.

1. Understand leadership – what is leadership in an organization? How is leadership different from management? Understand the Myths related to leadership. Learn various known theories on leadership, how they can be applied? What makes leadership fail?
2. Self Analysis – Discover your own hidden potentials and shortcomings through extensive self analysis using many of the known tools. Review your personal qualities, your passion, confidence and knowledge. Are you ready to move beyond your comfortable zone?
3. Prepare Vision – Determine what your want to be? What role in the organization do you aspire for in the long run? Is your vision feasible? Are you passionate enough to go for it?
4. Prepare Plan – Develop a plan that has various clearly described, equidistant milestones.
5. Monitor Outcome – track the progress of your plan. Collect 360 degree feedback from all ranks in your organization.
6. Adjust Plan – Amend your plan based on the feedback and self observations and continue with execution of your adapted plans.
7. Reward yourself – Always include certain rewards in your plan when the outcome of a sub-task is positive. It accounts for a plan with in-built motivation, something to always look forward to.

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