Leadership development - a waste of time?
- 15. March 2016
- Posted by: Ralf Juhre
- Categories:
The constantly increasing scope of standardization, as well as high legal requirements, rules, conditions and duties, mean that specialists and executives in the company have less and less room for maneuver in technical questions. In this difficult and constricting initial situation, employee motivation and commitment become even more relevant to success. If they are left on the sidelines, it is difficult to think of safeguarding the company in times of decreasing employee retention periods.
The most important internal adjustment screw for intrinsic (inner) employee motivation and the daily commitment is the lived management culture in the company. It is the central control instrument for the behavior of the employees. The management culture is therefore of enormous importance especially in times of crisis:
Leadership culture – the sum of the (pre-)lived leadership competencies – arises from specialist knowledge, social skills, and experience.
In the past, many medium-sized industrial companies attached more importance to professional training than to executive development. There is no cluelessness when it comes to creating or promoting team spirit, for example. Managers also have question marks in their faces when it comes to annual employee appraisals or when a conflict is about to arise. The leadership competency that is absolutely necessary today is, therefore, a current field of work and includes topics such as self, goal and time management, leadership styles and leadership instruments as well as change management.
Conventional leadership development generally follows a technocratic approach: leadership instruments are trained that a manager “should” master. The basic leadership training focuses on universally valid insights, which leads to a processing of the topic of leadership in the company. Often contents pass by with this proceeding at the actual needs of the participants, whereby the learning effect is equal to zero and the high-level personnel regard it as a waste of time. The readiness for further development measures decreases. BUT: The success of each enterprise stands and falls with the guidance. Customers, suppliers, and banks judge the efficiency and the reliability of an enterprise increasingly after training and knowledge conditions of the human capital. This is why it is important to attach particular importance to executive development.
Executives usually have a lot of experience and are under great time pressure. Therefore they demand more and more individual training programs. The individual interest in continuing education often focuses on personal “suffering issues” for which managers are looking for a good and permanently applicable solutions.
For this reason, an intensive analysis and evaluation of the actual leadership strengths and leadership development fields at the beginning are important. This first step thus serves to ascertain requirements and at the same time to create transparency and insight into the necessity of appropriate training and further education measures. The next step is to design suitable development tools that are precisely adapted to the individual circumstances of the company. Continuous quality control of the measures is important in order to make any necessary corrections to the procedure or the instruments. Equally important is a final examination of the continuing education offensive.
The acceptance and quality of the training process as well as the sustainability and efficiency of the learning success are ensured by the integration of the managers to be trained and educated right from the start. Nothing stands in the way of a strong will to perform and a high level of employee motivation!