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Leadership Assessment #3 – Growth & Development

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: There are hundreds of assessments for leaders. The content and quality of these assessments vary greatly. You can spend a lot of time and money taking surveys to tell you the quality of your leadership. There are a few leading indicators that can be used to give a pretty good picture of the overall quality of your leadership. These are not good for diagnosing problems or specifying corrective action, but they can tell you where you stand quickly. Here is one of my favorite measures. It is the level of growth and development of people.

Leadership Assessment #3 – Growth & Development



Growth & Development

Good leaders focus on the growth and development of people. If you want to test the caliber of a leader, just measure how much energy she spends on developing people. The concept is that there is vast reservoir of talent in all people that is ripe for development.

I estimate that most organizations typically get around 20% of the available energy and talent of their workforce. My estimate may be a bit off, but not too far. Think of this. It would mean that we can triple the productivity of the workforce and still have people working at roughly 60% of their capacity. Wow, what a great way to improve output and lower costs. Of course you cannot get 100% of the energy of all people all of the time. That would require so much adrenalin it would kill everyone. But we really don't need the 100%. I contend there is so much pent up potential in most organizations the upside is seemingly infinite.

What holds us back? Well, it is a lot of factors I am describing in this series. One of the key ones is whether people have been given the skills to do their best work. Good leaders know this and put a lot of emphasis in the development of people.

You can contrast this with poor leaders who do not seek to do much development. They may be afraid that if they develop outstanding raw talent they will surpass the leader and leave him in the dust. They may be too ignorant to realize that 1 hour in a good training program brings more than 3 incremental hours of productivity to the organization. It may be that the organization is in such a state of panic, there is simply no time to develop people for the future. This myopic viewpoint is similar to the orchestra playing their final tunes on the Titanic.

Another aspect of development is the degree to which the leader seeks to grow as an individual. Does she have discussion groups around some loeadership books? Is she enrolled in several professional organizations? Does she spend timegoing toat least one professional conference per year? Does she listen to recorded programs while driving? Does she have an active reading list? All of these are signs of a person who is really interested in growing as a leader. When you see these signs, you know the person understands the value of continuous learning. If they are absent, even if for good and valid reasons, it shows a lack of interest in development, which is a sign of a weak leader.

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Article Tags: Development, Growth, Leadership, morale, motivation, Training, Trust



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