Dan McCarthy offers “10 Powerful Ways to Develop Your Employees.” Dan Rockwell says that there are “5 Essentials for Developing Remarkable Leaders.” That’s all good, but the companies who do leadership development well do more. They pay attention to the environment and create a culture of leadership development.
Get serious
If you’re serious about leadership development you need more than a budget line item and a few pious statements. Leadership development needs to be a priority for everyone.
Top management should give it time and attention. Money needs to be spent on it. And it needs to be part of every manager’s job and the regular rhythm of the business.
Get realistic
Take stock of where you are now. What do you have to do so that leadership development becomes “the way we do things around here,” Marvin Bowers’s classic definition of culture.
What training and resources do you have to provide? How do you have to change your meeting schedule and your compensation? What about performance management?
Get organized
Great leadership development doesn’t happen by accident. If your company isn’t doing a good job of it, you’ll be making a lot of changes. So settle in for the long haul. Think through how you’ll create a change to a culture of leadership development in your company.
Better now than later
It’s easy to put off the change to serious leadership development until “someday” or “when things get better.” Don’t do that. It takes time and effort to change culture. It takes time for leadership development to bear fruit.
