So much leadership development fails at the first hurdle because it focuses on individuals, skills or culture – but not all three at once. For interventions to work, they need to take into account the whole picture.
Leadership training and development tends to fall into three categories. Pause to reflect on the leadership programmes you’ve run in the last few years and you’ll see they are typically focused on one of the following:
- Coaching aimed at the individual.
- Team leadership interventions that focus on the skills leaders need in order to be effective with their direct team.
- Leadership programmes that aim to distill a particular leadership culture across the company.
Unfortunately, that is exactly the problem – leadership development interventions too often focus on just the leadership challenges of the individual, or the leadership style needed by the team, or the leadership culture encouraged by the company. If these three areas aren’t looked at in conjunction, a leader can feel a lot of confusion and conflict over what is expected of them. It can feel a little like being a dog with three masters.
Read more here on how you can build more effective leadership development programmes to benefit not only your leaders, but their teams and the entire company.
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