Leadership Development Program
Shabina Dhother
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What Is A Leadership Development Program?
Leadership programs or Leadership Development programs are programs that are designed in a manner that align with the fast changing things all around the globe. The main objective of leadership development programs is to provide an opportunity to learn or improve the persistent skill set, abilities and confidence of present day business leaders and make them ready for the future or bring the upcoming generation of future leaders.
It was found in a study that on an average an industry spends approximately $14 billion on leadership development programs which cover around 70,000 books revolving around leadership development. These numeric data can give us a clear picture of the growth of the leadership development industry.
Types Of Leadership Development
When we talk about leadership development, we do not talk about a specific quality or character in a person. Rather leadership development is concerned with a holistic development of a person in a way that he or she should be able to lead a group of people in the most effective manner.
Many people when talking about leadership development talk about giving short courses which trains a person to think and take decisions that a leader should take. But this approach towards leadership development has slowly begun to change and take a new shape where it is believed that leadership development is not something time constraint rather it is an ongoing process. With this new approach’s perspective let’s look at the four E’s of leadership development.
Education
The first E of leadership development is Education which is concerned with the traditional approach of giving out knowledge in leadership development. In this, you will get familiar with the basics of leadership development in the most academic manner possible. Citing a few examples of such can be the books, lectures, different online courses and training and many more.
Experience
The second E of leadership development is Experience which says that any work can be handled in multiple ways possible and there is always a room for learning through experience and doing things better. It says that while working on a project – whether successful or not or could have been done better, there is always something new to learn and with each learning experience you come across with you develop multiple new skills or enhance your existing skills be it any soft skill or team management.
Exposure
The next E of leadership development is Exposure which says that learning and working under mentorship is a good way but one should also get the opportunity to deal with things on their own. Doing work on your own will give you exposure to all the different aspects related to your work and will give you a sense of authority and accountability. In this way, the organisation can also analyse your weakness or strong points and can make better use of your skills and can also help you in enhancing more of your skills.
Evaluation
The last E of leadership development is Evaluation which is very essential and sometimes gets missed if things seem to be going in the right directions. However, that should not be the case. Leaders and all the people aspiring to be leaders should be evaluated all the time and keep a track of their shortcomings and their strong areas. There might be times when while dealing with one situation a leader showed a certain strong point but seem to have missed on it while dealing with a different scenario.
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Importance Of Leadership Development
A leader is a person who carries the whole team with it. A leader’s work does not only concern with getting things done. Rather a leader is the one who is also responsible for the growth of ones under him or her. This is so in a research conducted, it was revealed that most managers feel that they lack necessary skills to be a leader.
Investing in a leadership development program for your organisation can be a good investment and can lead to generating good assets for your organisation. Let’s look at some ways in which leadership development programs can prove to be beneficial.
- A good leadership development program will lead to making good leaders under which employees will enjoy working. This will reduce attrition rate for your organisation.
- With a continuous scope of learning new skills through leadership development programs, employees will tend to stay longer in your organisation. Hence improving the employee retention rate.
- Not all the employees will have work all the time to keep them engaged and make them feel productive. However, having a leadership development program, employees can engage themselves in growing their skills and feel productive.
- The young and the upcoming generation of population is the future leader for your organisation and providing them with the opportunity to learn and develop leadership skills will structure the formal planning and working of your organisation.
- With more opportunity to grow and learn, especially as a leader will tend to attract good employees to your organisation.
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Top Leadership Skills To Include In Leadership Development Program
Organisation can choose to include different courses, training and programs to include in theri leadership development programs, depending what they would like to inculcate in their future leaders. However, there are few leadership skills that are believed to be a good and a must set of skills that a good leadership development program will have. Let’s look at these good to have leadership skills to include in a leadership development program.
- Goal setting and planning skill is one skill to include in a leadership development program. A leader should be able to identify the objective and plan on achieving that objective within a certain time frame.
- A leader should be able to clearly communicate with its team as well as his superiors. There can be times when a leader needs to negotiate with the superior on behalf of his team or needs to negotiate with the team members in order to get work done. This is the reason good communication and negotiation skills should also be a part of a good leadership development program.
- A leader does not need to do all the work by himself or herself and he or she should know how to delegate the work to its team members based on their skills. At the same time, a leader should be responsible enough to take responsibility for the work. This brings us to the skills of delegation and accountability that a good leader should have and therefore these skills should be a part of a leadership development program.
- There will be times when there might be conflict of any kind within the team which might or might not impact the task at hand. Irrespective of anything, a leader should be able to resolve the conflict between the team members in order to maintain peace and harmony and keep the work going. This tells us that a good leadership development program should have conflict management as a skill to inculcate in its leaders.
- A leader works with a team and this says that a leader must be good at team management which is another skill that a leadership development program should have.
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Conclusion
Now you know all the things you need to know for a leadership development program. But remember that a leader is not made overtime. People tend to learn these skills but not everyone aspires to become a leader. Sometimes people aspire but lack confidence in themselves. You have to keep a constant eye on all your employees and motivate them to work and help them become better leaders!
Sometimes, a leader will be made on its own based on skills and sometimes you will need to motivate your employees. You are all set to go for a leadership development program, so let’s get right to it!
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FAQs
What are the leadership tasks?
A leader has no defined task but whatever the task is, it revolves around building and maintaining its team. Leadership tasks can include training new employees, communicating, motivating, helping team members to achieve both personal and professional goals and many more.
What are the key points to strong leadership?
A strong leadership tends to have transparency in work, confidence, trust of the team members, creativity and a tendency to learn from the past mistakes.
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