The Biggest Mistake in Leadership Development is...

The biggest mistake in leadership development is waiting to do it.

Too may (all?) organizations wait until they promote someone to a leadership position and then start to apply leadership development.  And that’s for the lucky folks. Most organizations don’t offer any kind of development to their new leaders and instead let them struggle to figure it out all on their own. I know that’s what happened to me the first time I was promoted to a managerial role. I was flattered that the organization thought I had the potential to lead a department of eight at the tender age of 25, but then I panicked because the only “training” I had was modeling the good leaders I had had in my life and anti-modeling (yep, I made up a new word) the bad ones. I was flying by the seat of my pants. This was especially terrifying because at least two of my employees were old enough to be my mother.

This approach is really unfair to the individual and detrimental to the organization.

There are plenty of things we learn through the school of hard knocks – not to speed through a yellow light, not to cheat on an exam, not to lie on our resume… and most of the time the only person we hurt is ourselves.

Often, in the midst of the pain, we’ll think, “If only someone had warned me…” But in the workplace, there are other individuals that are impacted when a new leader is rattling around trying to find their footing. And without good guidance, new, unskilled managers can really do damage.

Don’t know the difference between constructive and critical feedback? Perhaps you’ll figure it out when your employees start to defect. Don’t recognize your personal bias in a performance review? The HR department can bring you up to speed when one of your employees lodges a complaint. Think it’s OK to hang with the boys (but not the women) after hours? Lesson learned. Lesson learned. Lesson learned.

What’s truly unfair to the new leader is that the organization is expecting him/her to also take on new functional responsibilities like scheduling, project planning, budgeting, and more. This is too much to ask of a new leader all at once – to be functionally responsible for a department and to change their behavior at the same time. As a training and development professional for decades, I know that the hardest thing to “train” someone to do is to change their behavior. Yet organizations consistently drop the ball on shaping individuals’ leadership behaviors early on.

This is detrimental to the organization as well because when push comes to shove, the new manager will need to focus on their functional responsibilities – it is what they will be judged on after all; and in all likelihood, it is what got them promoted in the first place. So without a focus on leadership and interpersonal skills early in one’s career, there is a lot of heavy lifting that is required of a new leader – and any failings impact both the individual and the organization.  

The Solution is Early Leadership Development

In a perfect world, leadership development would begin the moment a new employee walks in the company’s door. They would be handed their HR paperwork and a development plan for the next 3 to 5 years. Not  only would this approach benefit the organization by ensuring everyone has “baseline skills” (of your choosing) such as business writing, giving and receiving feedback, understanding how the company makes (and keeps) money, and more, but think of the impression made on the new hire! “Wow. This company is investing in me from day one? Amazing!” 

In today’s business environment, a need for and a confidence in employee’s self-leadership skills is critical. I’ve seen a number of articles lately that discuss company’s monitoring their employees while they are working at home. This seems perfectly reasonable if your company has not set and trained for a certain standard of behavior. It’s like trusting your child to stay home alone for the first time. The parent who hasn’t trained for good decision making and responsibility is a lot more worried than the parent who has.

In the long-term, the company that has trained for leadership skills at the start of their employees’ careers will have a ready and capable pipeline of leaders who can fully focus on their functional responsibilities because their leadership abilities are standard-operating-procedure by the time they are promoted.

At The Training Doctor we specialize in preparing your employees for future leadership roles. Apply early and often, for best results. Give us a call to discuss your needs. It never hurts to ask… is another truism my mother taught me.