By Anita Bowness
Leadership roles are tough, and the actions of a leader have a ripple effect that can be felt throughout the organization. Here with tips for ensuring this ripple effect is positive for your company is an article by Halogen Software’s Anita Bowness, who is the global practice leader for Business Consulting.
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Like a stone thrown into the water, what leaders do has a ripple effect that extends well beyond those immediately around them. Besides impacting performance, leaders serve as role models, impacting the attitudes, behavior, and organizational culture with almost every interaction they have with their peers and direct reports.
Here are the first two of five tips to help ensure the ripples cast by leaders at all levels impact your organization in a positive way.
1. Pick Potential Over Performance
All too often, managers are hired based on previous success, experience, and technical skills over harder-to-quantify leadership potential. According to Gallup research, great leaders have a rare combination of five competencies: They motivate others, assert themselves to overcome obstacles, build strong, trusting relationships, hold themselves and others accountable for high performance, and make informed, unbiased decisions for the benefit of their team and their organization.
However, Gallup reports that only about 10% of employees naturally possess leadership skills, and another 20% of employees can develop as leaders if their organization invested in the appropriate coaching and development plans for them.
This is an area where HR professionals can have great influence by providing assessment tools to uncover those with leadership potential and the resources and tools for leaders to develop key competencies.
HR professionals can incorporate leadership skill assessment throughout the talent management process, including hiring, performance management, employee development, and succession planning to bring data-driven rigor to talent management and succession planning decisions.
2. Provide Early Manager Development
Joint research by DDI and Brandon Hall indicates that 43% of organizations reported little or no effective leadership development for first time leaders and supervisors.
Like other habits, the behavior of leaders is hard to change once they become habitual, so it makes sense to ensure that new managers are provided with the tools, training, and resources needed to acquire and assimilate good leadership skills that an organization values early in their careers.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, Bowness presents three more tips for developing great leaders.