The Importance of Leadership Development
Talk to most people about the importance of leadership development and you will likely hear why it’s so important.
Studies have proven that leadership development efforts help you:
- Retain emerging leaders
- Improve engagement and job satisfaction
- Improve corporate results
- Increase change management success
- Improve your organizational culture
These and many other reasons are often cited, and they are all good reasons.
3 Reasons Not to be a Superhuman Leader
But there’s one reason that I believe surpasses the others: leadership development allows you to multiply your efforts.
What do I mean? It’s simple. If there’s only one leader who must do everything, you limit progress. You may think you’re important, but really you are a choke point. If you’re out sick, work stops. If you’re busy in a meeting, progress halts.
If you don’t invest in others, then you need to be a superhuman leader.
There are three reasons that isn’t a great model of leadership:
First, it puts all the pressure on you, leaving no room for error.
Second, it provides no growth for new leaders.
And last, it means that your organization won’t benefit from other leadership styles. The panel goes on to provide some great, actionable tips on how to help “lead leaders” within your team.
Multiply Your Efforts
Another quality of servant leadership is directly focused on leadership development. A servant leader develops other leaders. It’s actually much harder than it sounds.
To uninitiated or selfish “me-first” leaders, it sounds like a cop out. “Oh, you want to train other leaders so you don’t have to do all the work, eh?” Well, if you’ve ever been a trainer, you know that’s just not true. And if you’ve ever tried to help bring up a member of your team, you know it’s often a challenging journey. But one that can be very rewarding—for both of you.
It’s rewarding for them, because they can get the chance—in a relatively safe environment—to try on some of the aspects of leadership without all the perils. And it’s rewarding for you, because you can learn new styles of leadership from someone whose skills and ideas will usually be different from yours—which isn’t just “OK,” but fantastic! Learn to learn from your team as you go through the process.
Fundamental to leadership is creating other leaders.
And that is the topic of we discuss on this Aim Higher episode. I hope you enjoy the discussion. Don’t forget to listen below.
or on iTunes by clicking here.
