Bridging the Leadership Gap
By: George Ramos, AVP for Learning and Development, TeleDevelopment Services, Inc.
Today’s business environment demands so much from our frontline managers as the fast-paced turnover of systems, processes, technology, and resources take more than just the regular management skills. As it is, the current and future success of an organization depends on a workforce where everyone recognizes that their responsibilities go beyond skills and titles. As the integration of customer, constraints, quality and people management take center stage in the global business arena, being able to lead efficiently and effectively becomes the order of the day. Nowadays leadership is not just a job---it becomes a duty that should result in bringing in the business results for an organization in the best way possible.
The Business Case
Things move so fast, decisions have to be made, period. Without good leadership within the ranks, any organization will be replete of growth and will eventually be overtaken by its competitor. At the heart of it all is the bottomline, and once they go unrealized, all the strategic efforts spent by an organization to challenge its competitors, build good talent, and install foolproof processes all go to waste. This is the reason most organizations spend so much time determining the right leadership competencies that will not only oversee the workforce, but also ensure the future growth of the business through an effective succession mechanism.
However, how do we build our leaders? How do we close these gaps from Management to Leadership? It would be good to find out the difference between the two first:
|
Managers
|
Leaders
|
|
Get things done thru effective planning, monitoring and execution thru supervision
|
Able to understand, communicate and articulate the business and how the daily operations align to the overall delivery strategy
|
|
Gets results from others by delegating effectively
|
Ability to elicit performance from the team to support the organizational strategy
|
|
Focuses on the transactional day to day operations
|
Proactively lead change to add more value to the business
|
|
Solves problems as they happen
|
Improve overall enterprise delivery thru systems and strategic thinking even before any problems occur
|
|
Eliminate roadblocks to ensure work is being delivered efficiently and correctly
|
Agile enough to decide and provide effective solutions that have both short and long term impact to the business
|
How can we develop these Leadership Competencies?
We can, but it’s a long shot. Training concepts will only play a small part in building the awareness and fundamentals necessary to leadership. To bridge the Gap, organizations should build their leaders according to the following formula of learning by doing and applying:
1. Managers should learn the art of Coaching and Mentoring its direct reports—It’s not about just delegation, but promoting ownership for direct reports to do things right through their own accountability lens. The Manager facilitates action and results instead of showing and telling direct reports what to do.
2. Managers should be able to network and build meaningful relationships at all levels of the organization, most especially with customers and suppliers as a means to build influence, branding, and alignment.
3. Managers should build their own leadership competencies by aligning itself to the critical leadership competencies identified by the organization. While organizations have defined core competencies, it should be the role of the leader to adjust to these competencies based on his personality, to create something unique, but at the same time universal in appeal.
4. Leadership entails developing people. Managers can begin to lead by helping people align their long and short-term development plans to the goals of the organization. Leaders should help its direct reports discover and explore their strengths and improve on weaknesses that will both be of value to the business, and contribute to the motivational requirements of the direct report.
5. Managers should also cascade all his learned leadership skills down to line to make the work and his operations more efficient, and in turn build future leaders.
6. Managers should immerse themselves in the deeper recesses of the business in order to understand and articulate its strategy better. His primary role is to lessen the gap and the distance of the business strategy and the execution cadence of the organization.
7. Finally, leaders should set the pace and standards of performance by influencing everyone to act the same way. This entails credibility and building motivation through inspiration.
The Bottomline
All of the above are not just concepts that can be learned quickly in the classroom. They need to be set up as systems and norms that can be adapted and performed with rigor and patience in order to close any organizational leadership gap.
The TDS Difference
We at TeleDevelopment Services, Inc. understand that there is a huge gap between Management and Leadership roles. Upskilling the employees of today to be the leaders of the future continue to be one of the industry’s top challenges. TDS’ management and leadership development programs have been created specifically for the BPO sector to focus on the fundamentals of leading in a fast-paced, results-driven, constantly changing workplace.
Ready to build develop your people into leaders? Contact us at:
U.S. number: (1.888) 788.4441
Philippines number: (632) 631.8230/ (632) 570.9739