Organizational Leadership Development:Developing Business Leaders

Organizational Leadership Development is the key to developing business leaders.

When you equip people, you teach them how to do a job. If you show someone how to use a machine or device that's equipping.

Development is different. When you develop people, you are helping them to improve as individuals. You are helping them acquire personal qualities that will benefit them in many areas of life, not just their jobs. When you help someone to cultivate discipline or positive attitude, that's development.

When you teach someone to manage their time more effectively or improve their people skills, that's development. When you teach leadership, that's development.

Most leaders don't have a developmental mindset. They expect their employees to take care of their developmental needs on their own.

What they fail to realize, however is that development always pays higher dividends because it helps the whole person and lifts him to a higher level. Here are the principles of Organizational Leadership Development.

Organizational Leadership Development

Development is harder to do than equipping, but it is well worth the price. Here's what you need to do as you get started in Organizational Leadership Development.

1) See Development as a long term process

Organizational Leadership Development takes time because it requires change on the part of the person being developed and you can just rush it. As you develop people, think of it as an ongoing process, not something you can do once and then be done.

You cannot give what you don't have. In order to develop your staff, you need to keep growing yourself.Plan to develop the people who work for you. Make it consistent and regularly scheduled activity.

2) Discover each person’s dreams and desires

When you develop people, you do it on the bases of their needs. You give them what they need in order to help them become better people. To do that well, you need to know the dreams and desires of your employees.

Someone rightly said, you ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power. Dreams are generators of energy with your people.

If they have high passion for their dreams, they have high energy. If you know what those dreams are and you develop them in a way that brings those dreams within reach, you not only harness that energy, but you also fuel it.

3) Lead everyone differently

One of the mistakes leaders make is that they try to lead everyone the same way. Unfortunately everyone does not respond to the same kind of leadership. Don't use the same strategies and methods with everyone.

You have to figure out what leadership buttons to push with each individual person on your team. One person will respond well to being challenged, another will want to be nurtured; another will be passionate if he or she creates the game plan.

To be an effective leader, you must adapt to your people and not expecting them to adapt to you

4) Use organizational goals for individual development

In other to use organizational goals for development you need to find a need or function within the organization that would bring value to the organization, then find an individual on your team with a strength that needs developing that will help to achieve that organizational goal, finally provide the time, money and resources the individual needs to achieve the goal.

The more often you can create alignment like this, the more often you will create wins for you, your followers and the organization.

5) Help them know themselves

A person can't be realistic about his potential until he is realistic about his position. In other words, you have to know where you are before you can figure out how to get someplace else. The first step of every leader is to help his followers define reality, i.e. help them know their strength and weakness.

6) Be ready to have a hard conversation.

For us to see growth in our organization, we have got to pay a prize. It’s usually not pleasant, but we have got to push in other to grow.

Good leaders are willing to have a hard conversation to start the growth process for the people under their care, i.e. they are willing to point out the areas of weaknesses that his followers must change.

7) Celebrate the right wins

Leaders who develop others always want to help their people get wins under their belts, especially when they are just starting out. Try to target wins based on where you want people to grow and how you want them to grow, that will give them extra incentive and encouragement to go after the things that will help them improve.

But if someone you are leading goes about the activity wrongly but still get the right result, you must point out his wrongs and not celebrate it.

8) Prepare them for leadership

The better your people are at leading, the greater potential impact they will have on and for the organization. It is more than just leadership lessons but taking them through a process that gets them ready to step in and lead.

The best training is like on the job training where people work side by side. Here you do it and they watch, then they do it and you watch and access them.

Conclusion

When you equip people, you teach them how to do a job. When you develop them, you are helping them to improve as individual, that's what organizational leadership development helps you achieve. Development is harder to do than equipping, but it is well worth the price.