Contemporary leadership training: Best practices for organizations seeking to develop competent leaders

Author: Iloka Benneth Chiemelie

Published: 28-November-2014

Introduction

It is widely known that both public and private organizations continue to invest heavily (both monetarily and timely) for the development of effective leaders. However, Allio (2005) made known that there is no guarantee that such training and development will bring about a subsequent increased in leadership abilities. This is because, it is not possible for people to learn how to ride a bicycle by just reading a manual. Leaders need more than just training and development in order to be effective and this research will seek to expand such understanding.

Some of the contemporary leadership training practices

In the modern business world, some of the contemporary leadership training practices involve enrolling the leaders into courses and/or programs. Such programs or courses can have durations ranging from one day, one week, and one month to one year. As Allio (2006) noted, the purveyors of these leadership programs have a dubious preposition that intensive educational program can bring about change in behavior, rise in consciousness, and it does have the ability to transform managers into leaders. The decision of organization to send their leaders into such programs is due to their optimism that they will become better leaders.

Best practices for organizations that seek to develop effective leaders

If organizations desire to establish effective management team, Allio t (2005) made reference to numerous other literatures to highlight some of the best practices for the organization to adopt as:

To adopt leadership programs that focus on building rhetoric skills – development of rhetoric skills are in line with Aristotle’s “persuasive marshalling of truth”, and it comprises of skills in communication, critical thinking and negotiation (McCauley and Van Velsor, 2004; Tichy, 2002). Such skills are essential in the management world because it will provide the leader with necessary competence needed to communicate overall objectives of the company to their followers as well as coordinate the way followers undertake their activities towards meeting such set objectives.

Equip the leader with necessary knowledge – leaders need to have a context of the market, economy and industry in which their organization operates, as well as an understanding of their own organizational competencies, cultural biases, strengths and weaknesses. Equipping them with such necessary knowledge will help in decision making process, as well as the general way they go about their business process (Allio, 2004; Badarocco, 2002; Bennis and Thomas, 2002; Collins, 2001; Goleman et al., 2002) In turn, it will raise their overall effective management process and competence as they know who they are and what they are dealing with.

Selecting the right leader is critical – another thing organizations need to do in order to develop effective leader is to identify the potential leaders with necessary building blocks of characters, compassion, and creativity, who have a clear sense of purpose as well as the right channel of energy to pursue such purpose (Kouzes and Posner, 2002). This is basically the foundation of creating effective leaders because training the wrong leader will yield undesired outcome. Since people have potentials in different areas, selecting the right leader is necessary. For instance, Michael Jordan is better than Tiger woods in basketball, but Woods golf better than Jordan. Thus, making Woods a basketball coach will be less effective (even when offered necessary training) than making Jordan the basketball coach and vice-versa.

Examples of organizations that are selecting, training, and assessing their leaders to better connect actions to leadership principles

In conjunction with their on-site training program, The Coca-Cola Company also provides staffs with online programs on leadership, which helps to train and assess them on necessary skills needed to ensure effective leadership (The Coca-Cola Company, n.d). Thus, it is one example of companies that select, train and assess leaders on necessary skills needed to ensure effective leadership outcomes.

Nestle is another example of such companies, and it even started the annual “Nestle USA Leadership Symposium (DLS)” in 2009 as a four-day intensive business program designed to provide diverse undergraduate students with necessary chance to network with key Nestle representatives and create a mutually beneficial outcome in which both their representatives and the diverse students learn about leadership in diversity (Nestle USA, n.d).

Conclusion

Effective leadership is necessity because it will help the organization to attain desired outcomes. However, contemporary leadership training practices are not yielding the practical competence needed to ensure effective leadership outcomes because they are based more on intensive education and reading, instead of practical approaches. Thus, it is necessary that companies that desire to develop effective leaders take into consideration the need to adopt practice based developments. This is because such will ensure more effective and reliable outcomes.

References

Allio, R.J. (2004), The Seven Faces of Leadership, Tata-McGraw Hill, New York, NY.

Allio, R.J. (2004), “Leadership development: teaching versus learning.” Management Decision Vol. 43 No. 7/8, pp. 1071-1077

Badarocco, J.L. Jr (2002), Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Bennis, W.G. and Thomas, R.J. (2002), Geeks and Geezers, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Collins, J. (2001), “Level 5 leadership”, Harvard Business Review, January. Fortune Magazine (2000), January. 

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. and McKee, A. (2002), Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Kouzes, J.M. and Posner, B.Z. (2002), The Leadership Challenge, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.

McCauley, C.D. and Van Velsor, E. (2004), Handbook of Leadership Development, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.

Nestle USA (n.d.), “Diversity: Leadership Symposium.” Available at: https://careers.nestleusa.com/diversity/diversity-leadership-symposium [Accessed on: 6^th of June, 2014].

The Coca-Cola Company (n.d). “Why Work at The Coca-Cola Company?” Available at: http://www.coca-colacompany.com/careers/why-work-at-the-coca-cola-company [Accessed on: 6^th of June, 2014].

Tichy, N. (2002), The Cycle of Leadership, Harper Business, New York, NY.