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This is Varada Patwardhan, Xebrio’s guest blogger.
This article:
Why is it so important that organizations support leaders more than ever before?
Modern organizations and the leadership gap
How can organizations create new leaders that are capable of achieving success?
What do new leaders need? Formal training
Support and guidance networksTools, and Technological Resources
Coaching in emotional intelligence and communication
Step 1: Build a leadership pipeline to set up new leaders for success
Step 2: Establish a leadership development program
Step 3: Align organizational goals with leadership
Step 4: Customize the growth-and-development plan
Step 5: Facilitate leaderassimilation
Step 6: Let leaders shape leaders
Step 7: Invite multi-level feedback
Step 8: Alleviate problems
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This is Angela’s story. Let me know if you can relate.
Angela was a natural leader and manager in group projects as a child. She believed she was destined for leadership.
After a few odd jobs and college, she was offered a job as an engineer in design. She was great at her job.
She was then promoted to project manager.
She was not trained at college for this job, nor was her company. She also wasn’t a good manager for quite some time.
Angela is not the only one who experiences this story. Nearly all new leaders are thrown into deep waters. New leaders face anxiety and psychological burdens.
Most organizations don’t provide the required ammo, except for a few formalities upon onboarding and cursory knowledge transfers.
Leadership roles are often given to hardworking, talented people who have made outstanding individual contributions. We need to realize that the skills required to be an effective leader and an individual contributor are quite different.
Organizations encourage talent and hard work, but they fail to create a strong leadership pipeline and great leaders at all levels, especially in an environment of flatter hierarchies.
Why is it so important that organizations support leaders more than ever before?
Ambiguity is the foundation of leadership and management.
Henry Mintzberg, a management expert, suggests in his book, “Managing” that the open-ended nature and flexibility of the job are one of the most important adjustments for new managers. He writes:
Managers and leaders cannot pause and reflect if there are no ‘tangible mileposts.
Henry MintzbergEven though metrics can be used to evaluate project performance, they are not a reliable indicator of progress as leaders.
Leaders today face a new set of challenges. The world of today is digitalized, globalized, competitive, and open to new ideas. The traditional leader’s role is not enough.
Modern leaders must lead projects, devise corporate strategy, align with organizational goals and align their behavior with that of modern-day employees.
This requires leaders to be global fluent and be able to defend against biases. They must also strive for greater collaboration, be proactive, seek out opportunities for their team members, and help them grow.
Because they are keen to expand to new markets, want to be flexible, and deliver at lightning speed, organizations must also cater to a more recent set of concerns.
Modern markets present new challenges, including the development of multiple generations and levels, millennials and older, veteran leaders, and the building of effective and flexible leadership without excluding ethnically or geographically diverse backgrounds.
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