We worked with several organizations for over a decade now. We helped them in various aspects of people management, leadership development and organizational development. In doing so, we always remained aligned with business and growth. From all these hands-on experience, we gained some deep insights.
One of such insights is related to leadership development. Every organization places high priority to groom their leadership and prepare a future pipeline. It involves identifying probable candidates, assessing their potential, planning leadership development programs followed by executive coaching. Many promising talented people will benefit from this entire process. However, we recommend another important step to this series of initiatives to enhance the success rate of the leadership development efforts. That is, expect more from your potential leaders! As simple or as rudimentary or as profound as it sounds – organizations must expect more from their leadership talent. Let me quickly present our reasoning for this recommendation.
Scenario–A:When you expect more, an individual may get overwhelmed and may be unwilling to shoulder bigger responsibilities. Then you get most useful insight – that is lack of readiness for leadership. You cannot expect such person to become your leader – at least, not soon!
Scenario-B:In case the individual accepts the higher expectations and starts working towards fulfilling those increased responsibilities, then it will lead to the following outcomes:
1. Firstly, he/she will groom someone within the team or augment the team to offload some of the existing responsibilities. So, delegation improves and second line development falls in place.
2. Secondly, he/she will invest in self to enhance the required competencies to meet the increased expectations. They will utilize all the channels that are offered by the organization because they have a ‘purpose’ behind their own development.
3. Lastly, they will look at making things happen and script a success story for themselves. So, they will work towards results and delivering value (in case they start the blame game and externalizing, then also you gain good insight about the individual and back to Scenario A).
Besides, by expecting more, you will be able to see the true person and all the dimensions – let it be the hunger to prove oneself, excessive caution, positivity or the other way, execution, commitment to results and so on. So, just expect more and get more from your leadership development efforts!
