CXO Bytes

Leadership development and performance: Two sides of the same coin in achieving organizational growth

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Future-focussed organizations don’t just build a strong workforce.Instead they groom leaders to drive sustained growth. As companies strategize to scale, they are often faced with obstacles due to leadership deficit. This brings to fore a wide gap between the leadership development and their performance that needs to be addressed with urgency.

While organizations invest in the development of their leaders with the hope of impacting their outcomes, traditional leadership development designs fall short by a wide margin of creating this impact.  It’s imperative to understand that leadership development and leadership performance aren’t disjoint. One impacts the other to deliver the effectiveness that the organization expects.

 

Embedded professional development – Return on performance

According to recent stats – a vast majority of 86% of organizations recognised the development of leaders and managers is critical for long-term success. However, fostering new leadership skills needs to be in line with their role and should reflect in their performance. Leadership development focuses on building leaders and helping them establish and execute their strategic vision to harness the competitiveness of the organization. While leadership performance involves the actual practice of innovation and leaders cultivating creativity and managing risks at all levels.

Traditionally leadership development has been disjoint from leadership performance. Leaders are provided “development opportunities” through executive programs and workshops on specific leadership competencies. While these provide awareness of frameworks and mental models, they fall short in the expectations of the leader and the sponsor in translating to outcomes on the ground.

In addition, coaching which is by far a proven effective method used for leadership development help challenge beliefs, brings shifts in mindset and certainly improves personal effectiveness. The gap here is that coaches operate without a view into the everyday leadership situations that the leader goes through and hence cannot provide contextual support when needed

The third traditionally used element for leadership development is access to content. Conventional leadership programs are highly oriented toward teaching content and imparting knowledge. However, content without context is simply information overload and results in the wastage of the organization’s resources.

For leaders to be effective to excel in their performance as a leader, their development needs to be embedded in their work context. It empowers them to bring a change in their mindset and apply the right skill set and toolset in real-time situations.

 

Wrapping up

For development to impact performance, leadership journeys need to be centered around performance goals or stretch outcomes.  It should equip leaders with relevant frameworks and mental models that are easy to apply and instantly help them see shifts in workplace behaviours.

Furthermore, it should provide context-specific advice that helps them improve on everyday leadership actions and determines their effectiveness as a leader. Therefore, for organizations to see the return on their investment in leaders, their development must be embedded in the flow of their everyday performance.

(The author is Mr. Hariraj Vijayakumar, Founder & CEO- NWORX and the views expressed in this article are his own)

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