26 Mar Making Magic: Leadership development for first-time leaders and managers.
Our March Organisation Development café conversation explored the idea of first-time leadership development as a ritual. We largely based the discussion on the Gantz (2010) article which examined volunteer organisations and proposed that leadership development may be the most important capacity of such organisations. We believe that the lessons of leadership development are also relevant for-profit organisations.
In organisations where recruitment and new employee onboarding are already ritualised processes, adding a ritual for first-time leaders has wide ranging benefits.
The transitions from being responsible for one’s own work (individual contributor) to being responsible for work done with others (team contributor) to being responsible for work done through others (supervisor or manager) are important transitions.
Along that journey, we are not only meeting people with unique identities. We are meeting professional and organisational identities as well. Gantz (2010) explores the leadership identity as an ability to (1) forge relationships, (2) develop shared stories, (3) strategise and (4) manage accountability through action.
A new leader is either left to his or her own devices to discover the foundations of leading people or is given some assistance. We can take a very brief look at each of these four leadership abilities and ask ourselves how we might accelerate their development for new leaders.
- Relationship
“An exchange becomes a relationship, … when a mutual commitment of resources is made to a shared future” (Gantz, 2010), and those relationships may become social capital for the new leader. A new leader enters a new relationship with his or her new manager, new leadership peers, new subordinates, and with the organisation in a new way. The new leader also enters a new relationship with him or herself, shifting professional identity.
- Story
Hope is not a strategy, but it is a pre-requisite for strategy and action. Without hope, there is no fuel for developing ways of moving forward. Leaders gather and share stories of hope, fostering curiosity and learning, leading to the capacity for problem solving. “…leaders mobilise the emotions that make agency possible.” (Gantz, 2010)
- Strategy
New leaders in an organisation do not get a full deck of cards – they get the hand they are dealt in terms of resources to get the job done. They are not executives atop the resource pile. They must work with what they have.
“Just as storytelling is key to meeting the motivational challenge, so strategy is key to dealing with the resource challenge: the fact that challengers of the status quo rarely have access to the conventional resources that its defenders do” (Gantz, 2010).
New leaders collaborate with their superiors and with their team (if they are working in a healthy way) to determine what needs to be done, and to uncover or discover what resources they have at their disposal to achieve something. By exploration they can reveal what they have in the talents of their team or the capacity of their equipment and use that in smart ways to move forward.
“Strategy is how actors translate their resources into power to get “more bang for the buck” (Gantz, 2010).
- Action and Accountability
Working with others, energised with stories of success that generate hope, aware of the resources available, with a goal in mind and a plan to use what resources are available, a new leader must generate meaningful action.
“Perhaps the greatest … “action” challenge is consistently translating intent into outcome: making things happen, on time; counting them; and evaluating them for continual improvement” (Gantz, 2010).
That means having some sense of direction or a goal in mind (from the strategy), gaining commitment from the relationship network, holding subordinates to account through feedback, and supporting subordinate efforts through coaching.
“Action refers to the work of mobilizing and deploying resources to achieve outcomes. It is the bottom line of the relational, motivational, and strategic work” (Gantz, 2010).
Critically, the organisational relationships need to be based on resource-exchange toward a goal. The new leader must have the ability to “turn… strategy into specific measurable outcomes with real deadlines” (Gantz, 2010)
Developing new leaders
So, what are our options for developing new leaders?
We can leave our new leaders to search the internet and watch online videos, as they try to find some useful way of coping. This has no organisational context. If we believe that leadership is to any extent contextual, then we believe that leadership of a specific team in a specific organisation in a specific industry in a specific town in a particular country is unique. General tips and tricks of leadership may not be as helpful as one may think.
We can also hope for coaching or mentorship from a more experienced person inside our organisation – which is a tremendous benefit if that mentor is a good mentor. Not all mentor relationships work, but they are generally helpful.
We can send our new leaders into public programs, where they learn about leadership with other new leaders. This has the benefit of a general and structured approach to leadership development but (like learning from social media) does not have the specificity of leading in a specific context.
We can also create in-company leadership inductions that run withing the “churn cycle,” where the churn cycle is the rate at which new leaders are brought into the organisation. In some organisations there are new leaders coming into the organisation on a weekly basis, and enough of them to form three cohorts per year (or more) of new leaders. In others, an annual new leader program would be enough. These programs can be structured by your L&D team (like a public program), innovative (bringing the best of applicable social media and AI support), mentorship-rich (including senior executives in relationship-building and story-developing activities) and action-oriented (using action-based learning to drive outcomes directly from the training.
The benefits of intentional in-company investment in leadership development are wide ranging. The new leader gets individual benefit (such as accelerated skills development that support career growth) and the participating senior executives also get individual benefit (such as new cross-generational and cross-hierarchical relationships that ground their executive leadership). The employee groups also benefit, as their new manager can work toward successful outcomes that benefit the group in terms of continued employment, self-esteem, and potentially higher earnings. The organisation benefits from performance improvement.
Young leaders learning these skills are not only working beings. They are starting families, becoming a part of school communities, making friends, and engaging with society. Society in general benefits from intentional new leader development as the leadership skills of relationship, story, strategy, and action can have some benefits outside the organisation. Society gets stronger as young people learn and practice the basics of good leadership.
A new manager program can also become an essential part of the bottom-up / top-down approach to driving the organisation forward, toward success.
A few heuristics might be helpful to integrate new leadership development with the general development of a successful organisation. These are:
Create the key rituals (strategy development, senior and first-line leadership development, team kick-offs, new employee induction) as in-company rituals – not external public programs.
Integrate the key rituals through process design (strategy is a conversation, not a monument).
Senior executives take part in all rituals – talking, sharing updates, and listening.
We argue that leadership development should be ritualised, made a part of the ongoing cadence of the organisation. We need to resist the idea of ritual as unchanging. That is rarely true. Useful rituals adapt – as the identity of the firm shifts, the rituals shift. The ritual of inducting new managers should continue even as the managerial landscape changes. This creates deep layers of leadership over time. WorldsView Academy offer programs that are designed to be delivered in-company, adapting to your organisation’s context and accelerating the performance of leaders and teams at all levels.
References:
Gantz, M. (2010). Leading Change: Leadership, Organization and Social Movements, in Handbook of leadership theory and practice: A Harvard Business School Centennial Colloquium.
Putnam, R. “Social Capital and Institutional Success,” in Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 163–185.
Smith, A.C.T. & Stewart, B. (2011). Organizational Rituals: Features, Functions and Mechanisms; International Journal of Management Review.