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Developing
Leaders in Your Company
There are days when you feel as though you’re
the only one with a vision of your company’s future . . . when
you feel worn out from being the only voice calling for quality, change,
improving services to the customer, or reducing operating costs. Yes,
leadership—the capacity to attract and sustain the dedication and
commitment of others—carries weighty responsibilities. With leadership
comes the responsibility of guiding others towards great expectations
in quality, customer service, product development, and profitability.
Fulfilling this responsibility on your own, however, can be a tiring
task. Long hours and eternal vigilance is often the price of, single-handedly,
leading your enterprise into the future.
So, isn’t it about time that you identified
and developed others to share
the leadership? When you invite others to work with you in articulating
and demonstrating your company’s vision, it helps assure that,
when you take a vacation, enjoy a free weekend, or attend an out-of-town
conference, your business will carry on in the right direction and in
the right way.
What should you do to find and develop your company’s
future leaders? You first need to develop your definition of leadership.
Does it mean guiding others towards a compelling goal? Does it involve
challenging the status quo? Does it include taking risks to nudge the
company in a new direction? Leadership is more than just getting people
to do it your way with enthusiasm. Spend some time thinking about what
leadership means and what it might look like in your company. With this
definition in mind, you are ready to communicate your expectations to
those who may be ready to lead.
After you’ve defined your leadership expectations,
you need to demonstrate these qualities in your daily decisions and
interactions. Modeling the leader behaviors that you want to see in
others has a dramatic effect on your company by shaping its culture.
Demonstrating the leadership values and behavior you believe in lets
people know that you take your leadership role seriously and that you
have high standards for leaders. Your prospective leaders will take
their cues from you when they see you set challenging goals, deal effectively
with failure and adversity, respond quickly to opportunities, guide
staff through tough problems, or sensitively deal with an upset customer.
With leadership well defined and your active demonstration
of these qualities in your work, your next task involves identifying
those from among your staff who show the most promise as future leaders.
Characteristics and behaviors that suggest the capacity to lead include:
displaying interest and enthusiasm for the company and its business,
asking thought-provoking questions, demonstrating a willingness to go
the extra mile in customer service, freely offering ideas for improving
service or product quality or getting the work done faster, and demonstrating
a willingness to help or guide others in your company towards the desired
outcomes.
Once you’ve identified a prospective leader,
you then need to nurture and develop her capacities and skills. This
begins with exposing her to the depth and breadth of your business.
It means developing in her a broad-based knowledge of the industry and
its directions. You want her leadership to reflect insight and a perspective
that’s informed by what’s happening in your industry. While
you need her to also think outside the box of your business niche, her
value as a leader is enhanced when she knows the territory. The jazz
musician and conductor Wynton Marsalis argues that to be inventive and
creative in any musical realm requires that one first master the classical
forms. So too in business. Your future leaders need to know the territory
almost as well as you before they can offer the most useful ideas and
changes to guide the company towards long-term success.
You also need to give your prospective leaders real business problems and challenges to
solve. There’s nothing like asking one of your developing leaders
to consider a key challenge your business is facing—such as how
to improve the sales in your western region or how to attract and retain
higher quality employees—to bring out her critical thinking skills.
By presenting her with a real business challenge, you ask her to think
about the company’s future. Such challenges, at their best, push
the prospective leader out of her comfort zone. It deepens her awareness
of your company’s complexity and it builds ownership and responsibility.
In addition, it enables you to gain a new perspective on your company’s
future and it can give you insight into how she thinks and what her
future leadership potential is. By involving your developing leaders
in your company’s real problems and challenges, you are testing
their commitment, knowledge, insights, creativity, and resiliency—key
qualities that you’ll need from your future leaders.
It’s not enough, however, to give your prospective
leader a problem to solve or a challenge to overcome. He must also receive
your support for taking action to address the challenge. Although you
might disagree with his ideas or solutions or you might have additional
ideas or issues for him to consider, if you’re serious about developing
his leadership, you will give him the opportunity to act on ideas that,
to some degree, are his own.
Of course, leaders do much more than just come up
with new ideas and approaches to problem solving. They lead because
they attract followers. While we prefer the term “partner”
rather than follower, the idea is the same: leaders achieve great things
through the work of others. For this reason, your leadership development
efforts must also include mentoring and training your prospective leader
in how to coach others, create
attractive performance goals, give performance feedback, motivate and
inspire others to excellence, and build a team. Leading others requires
a new set of people skills that give other employees a reason to follow
your developing leader.
Finally, developing future leaders in your business
requires that you provide opportunities for rewards, recognition, and
growth as a leader. You will find that some of your new leaders thrive
on just the joy and challenge of leadership. All that this type of leader
wants is the opportunity and the freedom to shape the company and the
people who work there. Other leaders may want greater financial compensation,
new job titles, or even part ownership of your company. Whatever your
budding leaders may desire as a reward for helping you and your company
move successfully into the future, you need to ensure that you know
what keeps them motivated as leaders and—if you are willing and
able—that you provide these rewards for good leadership.
Developing leadership in others enables you to build a
strong company—one that’s stronger because it is less dependent
upon you for vision, direction, and inspiration. While the thought of
people other than yourself providing leadership for your company can
be scary, the alternative can be even scarier: being the only person
in your company who carries passion for building a great organization.
That’s why developing leaders in your company is one of the most
important things you can do.
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