It has been mentioned frequently and routinely whenever
there is a change in mission or strategies there must be an effective
leadership program in place to facilitate organizational culture and
expectations. For years there has been much attention, time and funding
dedicated to improve the capabilities of new leaders from within. It seems an
endless task as so many fail coming onboard and tackle the organizational
strategies and objectives to improve the workforce and prepare new leaders from
within. The key word being “within” and not outside the organization.
Needless to say this has wasted much time and money and not
met the challenge to improve the capabilities of managers and nurturing and
mentoring new leaders. Today much like yesterday, leadership development is a
number-one concern. This has created a void of enough good leaders and hinders
the performance and expectations of many organizations including the prison
management complex.
Other than the obvious negative dynamics created by
favoritism and nepotisms we have identified four common mistakes made in the
development of new leaders. This suggestion to look at these four areas is an
attempt to bring awareness to gain more production or development from organizational
leadership and meet the demands of the industry as it stands today. In addition
to this void, there is much more to work on quality versus quantity in order to
merge the right people with developing technologies and disruptive
uncertainties within the workplace.
Overlooking context -
Overlooking context - Context is a critical component of
successful leadership. A brilliant leader in one situation does not necessarily
perform well in another. Too many training initiatives we come across rest on
the assumption that one size fits all and that the same group of skills or
style of leadership is appropriate regardless of strategy, organizational
culture, or in some cases the top person in charge’s mandate. This is where
cross-training and rotating assignments come in beneficially and positively.
In the earliest stages of planning a leadership initiative,
companies should ask themselves a simple question: what is this program for? If
the answer is to support an acquisition-led growth strategy the company will
probably need leaders brimming with ideas and capable of devising winning
strategies for new or newly expanded mission changes or challenges. If the
answer is to grow by capturing potential opportunities, the company will
probably want people at the top who are good at nurturing internal talent. Context
is as important for groups and individuals as it is for organizations as a
whole.
Decoupling reflection from real work - When it comes to
planning the program’s curriculum, many agencies face a delicate balancing act
and are often restricted by statutory, funding or staffing limitations. The answer sounds straightforward: tie
leadership development to real on-the-job projects that have a business impact
and improve learning. But it’s not easy to create opportunities that
simultaneously address high-priority needs. The ability to push training
participants to reflect, while also giving them real work experiences to apply
new approaches and hone their skills, is a valuable combination in prison
management.
There, the gap between urgent “must do” projects and the
availability of capable leaders presents an enormous challenge. In such
environments, companies should strive to make every major business project a
leadership-development opportunity as well, and to integrate
leadership-development components into the projects themselves.
Underestimating mind-sets –
Becoming a more effective leader often requires changing
behavior. But although most companies recognize that this also means adjusting
underlying mind-sets, too often these organizations are reluctant to address
the root causes of why leaders act the way they do. Doing so can be
uncomfortable for participants, program trainers, mentors, and bosses—but if
there isn’t a significant degree of discomfort, the chances are that the
behavior won’t change. Promoting the virtues of delegation and empowerment, for
example, is fine in theory, but successful adoption is unlikely if the program
participants have a clear “controlling” mind-set.
It’s true that some personality traits (such as extroversion
or introversion) are difficult to shift, but people can change the way they see
the world and their values. Take the professional-services business that wanted
senior leaders to initiate more provocative and meaningful discussions with the
firm’s senior clients. Once the trainers looked below the surface, they
discovered that these leaders, though highly successful in their fields, were
instinctively uncomfortable and lacking in confidence when conversations moved
beyond their narrow functional expertise. As soon as the leaders realized this,
and went deeper to understand why, they were able to commit themselves to
concrete steps that helped push them to change.
Failing to measure results –
We frequently find
that companies pay lip service to the importance of developing leadership
skills but have no evidence to quantify the value of their investment. When
businesses fail to track and measure changes in leadership performance over
time, they increase the odds that improvement initiatives won’t be taken
seriously.
Companies can avoid the most common mistakes in leadership
development and increase the odds of success by matching specific leadership
skills and traits to the context at hand; embedding leadership development in
real work; fearlessly investigating the mind-sets that underpin behavior; and
monitoring the impact so as to make improvements over time.
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