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 Working on our leadership development skills is extremely important to our professional careers and personal growth as the complexities of life continue to present us with new challenges. Over our professional lives, we will be presented with the opportunity to learn new and exciting ways to more fully develop our leadership capabilities. In this publication, we will talk about some of the ways to get the most out of these experiences.
Developing Leadership Capabilities
Most of us learn about leadership over a lifetime's worth of nearly continuous learning. As we learn, our total leadership capacity increases and that can help to make us more effective leaders at work and even at home. In many instances, we learn about leadership and develop our leadership skills through formal courses administered by trained professionals.
But there is another way that our capacity increases and that is through the everyday challenges that we face as leaders. Our reaction and approach to each of these challenges provides us with another opportunity to develop and add to our leadership skills.
Another way we can become more effective leaders is by taking a proactive approach to learning new leadership skills via a documented career planning process.
Leadership Development Plan
To accurately understand what needs to go into a career development plan there are probably three pieces of information that are needed:
- An Assessment of Leadership Capabilities
- An Opportunity to Address Upcoming Challenges
- Feedback on Your Performance as a Leader
Leadership Capabilities Assessment
The leadership capabilities assessment can be part of a formal process such as a career assessment or the information can be gathered informally. The overall objective of this particular assessment is to help you understand where to focus your leadership development plan.
Here again, you will need three pieces of information:
- The leadership skills needed in the current assignment
- Your personal leadership strengths
- Your personal leadership opportunities (that's a nice way to say weaknesses)
There are many ways to gather this information. If you work in a larger company, your human resources department often has forms that can be filled out and mailed back to a third party service provider to analyze and compile the results.
You can also gather this information informally via open and honest discussions with coworkers. If your company can help you with this assessment, that's great. If you're on your own, make sure your approach to gathering information is what's termed 360 degrees. That means you want to talk to your boss, a peer and a subordinate / direct report.
Upcoming Leadership Challenges
The upcoming leadership challenges you need to think about are those that are either new to you or those where you might be showing a weakness in your leadership capabilities. Sometimes the challenge can be as simple as using a skill that has never been tested before.
The challenge may also be a change in perspective that you are unaccustomed to. It is easy to identify a challenge if you think about it this way - What are the things that might keep you off balance?
Remember, the point of this exercise is to figure out where you leadership capabilities might be weak and practice developing those leadership skills.
Feedback on Performance as a Leader
No leadership development plan would be complete without a feedback mechanism. It is important that you gain periodic, substantial and constructive feedback on your progress as a new or developing leader. You are set to experience new challenges and have identified a gap in your leadership skills that has become part of a development plan. It is important to monitor progress and make adjustments to behaviors as needed.
One way to gather feedback is by simply going back to those that helped you identify your leadership strengths and weaknesses and ask them the simple question - "How am I doing?"
Final Thoughts on Leadership Development
The best leadership development plans are the ones that you can make for yourself. And one of the best ways to learn is by understanding and reacting to the challenges of the work environment in which you actively participate nearly every day. Putting the plan together is really the easy part. Developing the right leadership skills can be much harder.
If you are honest in your personal assessment and have the business savvy to understand your challenges, then make sure you take the final step and get the help you need to gain feedback on your progress. We cannot do everything ourselves and the perspective and feedback of a coworker is something that can ultimately make us more effective leaders in today's workplace.
About the Author - Leadership Development
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