What is Your Leadership Plan for 2012?
By Kimberly Mitchell
©InterWeave Corporation, 2011. All Rights Reserved.
Kimberly Mitchell is the president of InterWeave, a performance management consulting firm focused to changing corporate cultures by transforming leadership behaviors. Visit Kimberly’s blog at www.wowperformance.com for more information on transformational leadership and behavioral management. Contact Kimberly at kmitchell@interweavecorp.com or 813-933-4432 for more information about Coaching to WOW, InterWeave’s process for holding leaders accountable for transforming their coaching behaviors.
It’s hard to believe that 2011 is coming to an end. Have you started planning your New Year’s resolutions yet? Is developing stronger leadership skills on your list? I’d like to help make your planning easier by giving you some ideas for where to get started with a leadership strategy that will advance your leaders to a higher level over the course of the next year. Leadership is the key to your success, so if your leaders are aligned then they will be well positioned to drive the necessary changes in your workforce. Here are the first five steps to get your leadership team geared up for an exciting and momentous year.
Develop a leadership mission statement. Just like your company has a mission statement, your leaders need a consistent roadmap to follow. If your leaders feel like scattered or just come in every day and fight fires without a designated direction for their personal growth and the development of their team, they are missing opportunities to be as effective and efficient as possible. Without a mission statement, your leaders are most likely not as consistent as they need to be. Can you imagine if your company had multiple mission statements how fragmented your organization would be? It’s the same for your leaders. Some of your leaders are coaching and putting employee development at the top of their priority list while others are spending a lot of time on projects and others are tending to administrative responsibilities. Your leadership team needs a cohesive bond that provides the direction and guides their tasks to be purposeful.
Design a leadership development strategy. Are your leaders maturing or are they just keeping the organization pointed in the right direction? Are your leaders helping to advance your company’s growth and evolve your business or are they maintaining the status quo? It’s time to develop a clear set of behavioral expectations and create an individualized plan for each leader so they can grow their skills. Leaders who transform cultures are inspiring, strategic, creative, and genuine community builders who forge relationships and execute plans with determination and skill. But what are the behaviors that will enable you to measure those criteria for success? Do your leaders clearly know what is expected of them and do they each have a plan to become a stronger leader? Take your job descriptions and expand on the necessary tasks that are required of your leaders. Observe your leaders in action and determine the behaviors that are each leader’s strengths and determine where the growth opportunities lie. Collaborate with each leader to help them individually and collectively become stronger.
Implement a team coaching methodology. Once a member of the workforce becomes a member of the leadership team, coaching tends to decrease, or nearly stop. It is important that leadership coaching continue as an integral part of you accomplishing your leadership development strategy. It is critical that leaders are provided with time for self reflection and encouraged to analyze their level of influence and impact on the success of an activity or a project. Raising our levels of self awareness promotes the sharing of ideas and the opportunity to do things differently in the future. Without time to consider alternative possibilities, leaders become stagnant and repetitive in the way they handle situations. Stimulate dialogues with leaders that compel them to consider other options to the current methods of doing business and encourage them to coach each other and themselves in order to advance their strengths.
Challenge the current tolerance levels. Look around your organization- do you see areas where your leaders are tolerating behaviors that are below your standards? When you see this happening, the first question to ask is, “Why are we tolerating behaviors that are lower than our standards?” By posing this question, you may identify obstacles that you were previously unaware of. Your leaders may not be comfortable coaching certain employees, they may not think they have upper management support, they may also be unclear of the standards themselves or they may have made the same observations and felt that the behaviors DO meet the standards. Again it is important to open up the dialogue with leaders to identify what is standing in their way of implementing improvement measures. Once you understand more clearly the challenges your leaders are feeling, then you can successfully implement changes to overcome their struggles.
Establish community building expectations. Are your leaders proactively forging relationships between teams and departments and with your customers and suppliers? Relationships are at the heart of successful businesses and your leaders should be setting the example of ways to deepen relationships, resolve disputes and overcome communication barriers. Are your leaders promoting positive relationships within your organization and seeking ways to build bridges and mend broken lines of communication? It is through harnessing the power of relationships that your leaders will make the largest contribution to your organization.
By starting with these five steps, you will build a solid foundation for a leadership strategy that will advance your company’s successes. It is only through the skills of your leadership team that your organization will progress and achieve its highest levels of potential. Are your leaders prepared to take you on the next step of your journey? These five tips serve as effective dialogue starters with your leadership team to gauge their cohesiveness and understanding of the importance of these aspects of effective leadership.