Leaders that make a difference in today’s rapidly shifting environment will need a new set of skills that, most of the time, are not found in traditional leadership development or executive education programs. Leaders need to take personal responsibility to develop these skills. Here are ten practical things you can do to help yourself:
Get involved in the leadership of a volunteer organization. Pick one that does not receive funding or support from your organization. Helping manage a volunteer organization is a powerful feedback and developmental experience. It removes you from your positional power base and allows you to assess your true impact. It is very different when people don’t have to listen to you or tell you what you want to hear. Many volunteer organizations are fractionated, political, and made up of conflicting special interest groups, yet they have to accomplish something. What better way to learn how to manage singles interests into the collective good.
Take evening courses or sign up for special programs that teach helping skills… The macro-leadership competency of the future will be the ability to help yourself, your organization, and your employees facilitate change and transition. The so called soft-skills are really the hard-skills, and certainly the relevant skills! Management will become a helping profession and managers will need the same kind of helping skills as other professionals in the field. The bad news, at least for the validity of their curricula, is that these kinds of offerings are not often found in business schools. The good news is that they can be found in other schools and departments such as psychology, sociology, counseling, organization development, and educational psychology. There are also one-time seminars and special programs put on by universities and consulting organizations.
Complete a professional 360-degree feedback instrument. By professional, I mean that you should use an instrument that has a history, validity standards, and norms. Have the results interpreted by someone trained in helping you understand what it means and doesn’t mean. Some organizations have their own 360-degree instruments and others use instrument licensed and certified by external vendors. There are also some excellent external organizations you can hire to administer such instruments.
Attend a professional leadership training program. This type of training is different from a program on marketing, quality, or performance management. It should focus on intra-personal insight, inter-personal skills, and the systems perspective necessary to develop a culture that leads to organizational learning. There are some very good in-house programs and many excellent external offerings.
Find a Truth Teller. It is particularly important for top managers to cultivate and use truth tellers. A truth teller is someone in the organization you can rely on to, as is said in baseball “call them they way they see them.” Truth tellers provide unfiltered feedback. They have three characteristics: they are tuned in to what is going on at all levels of the organization; they are secure and have no personal ax to grind; and you trust them.
Attend Laboratory Training. These sessions used to be called T-groups. Yes, this is sensitivity training, and yes, it is “feely” – but it probably won’t be “touchy.” The bottom line is that this kind of laboratory training is a very powerful way to get the depth of feedback that will lead to self-awareness. It is important to assure yourself that the facilitators are professional and the organization sponsoring the session has a track record with organizational managers.
Become familiar with the evolving future search technology. There is a whole new movement out there, using labels such as “future search,” and speaking of “getting the whole system in a room.” These large system-change processes go for the jugular in stimulating the learning organization. If you want to jump-start your understanding of learning in the collective, you need to get on the bandwagon; the technology is growing faster than it can be codified.
Learn how to have a dialogue. A dialogue is different from a discussion, an argument, a debate, or a business meeting. The dialogue process is very important in developing learning organizations and is central to collective learning. There are seminars and workshops. You can also find some consultants who can teach you and your organization dialogue skills.
Get active in your professional association. Don’t just attend the national meeting – become a worker, serve on committees, pass out the literature, do time in the information booth, set up the chairs! The higher up you are, the more the value of the grunt work. It forces you to see an organizational system from a different perspective and helps you rethink your own skills and assumptions as to what constitutes value-added.
Set up an intensive personal feedback project. One option involves retaining an external consultant to nearly overwhelm you with feedback from a wide range of data points. This is a very powerful process. You can’t escape valid data, and a skilled consultant will help you understand it and do something about it.
