Developing Tomorrows’ Leaders Today

How do we learn leadership lessons? We learn them by watching role models - positive and negative.  For example how do leaders learn how to manage subordinates? That is one of the first leadership experiences to garner. The second leadership lesson is to learn how to develop subordinates?Six things to do for developing your team members are:

§ Providing useful and timely negative feedback

§ Effectively delegating responsibilities

§ Patiently coaching them to handle difficult work

§ Opportunities to take on leadership roles

§ Highlighting their work to your superiors

§ Supporting initiatives to improve their qualifications or competence

These tips come from Meena Surie Wilson who handles Research, Innovation and Product Development for the Asia Pacific wing of Center for Creative Leadership. Meena has been part of CCL® since 1992 where she joined after a  Ph.D. in adult education and organizational development. She has just written the book Developing Tomorrows’ Leaders Today: Insights from Corporate India. Learning to manage subordinates and knowing how to develop them are 2 of the 11 lessons one needs to learn in one's career and there are 7 possible experiences one should seek to learn those lessons. Meena believes that organizations must actively structure and provide different experiences to their leaders to develop these lessons. That is what her book is about.

Her approach to leadership development is based on extracting lessons in leadership from on-the-job experiences. Managers at all levels need to know which experiences matter, what are the most important lessons to learn, and how learning occurs. Seven essential experiences and eleven vital lessons in leadership are identified; the importance of becoming a learner, and undertaking a leadership learning journey, is highlighted. We have to motivate future leaders to take charge of their own careers and cultivate an ability to learn from experience.Abhijit: If there is one experience that upcoming leaders should seek, what would that be? Meena: Among the seven must-have experiences, the one I most recommend to upcoming leaders is a horizontal move. Within one’s organization, this involves a job rotation to another function, location, or business unit--for example from operations to HR or from a city to a rural area. A horizontal move can also be a transition to a different organization or industry sector—for example, from working for a multinational to joining a start-up or leaving the defense forces to join a private company.The horizontal move does not need to bring increased status, salary, or title to the manager. The power of the horizontal move comes from the manager having to acquire new knowledge and expertise. To succeed, the manager must become a learner. Even more important, managers have to learn a different way of influencing other people, because the status and power accrued in one location/organization does not automatically transfer to another location/organization.Research at CCL confirms that learning to lead without formal authority is singularly necessary in today’s world. In global organizations, hierarchies are flatter and boundaries are permeable. Leading others means influencing others without using the authority associated with titles and higher status. Horizontal moves prepare managers to influence others in a different way.Abhijit: For top and senior level leaders, what is the message?Meena: Become an effective boss! Bosses and superiors, particularly in the Indian business environment, command a great deal of respect and deference. They are akin to parents and teachers. Their words and actions wield tremendous influence on others, perhaps more than they themselves realize. Bosses are watched and emulated. This is why each boss, particularly in many countries in Asia, should carefully consider what kind of role model they want to be. In the book, there are descriptions of bosses who have had the most impact on subordinates—positive and negative role models, teachers, and catalysts. The stories and exercises can stimulate bosses to reflect on their own behaviors and strive to become a better boss.Abhijit:  What would the HR Managers find in your book that they can use?Traditional approaches to leadership development are not adequate any more. A paradigm shift in leadership development strategies is underway. Signaling this paradigm shift, this book weaves in three themes that will typify successful leadership development efforts in the future.The first theme is that leadership development must become a shared responsibility between upcoming managers and their organizations. The book content makes it easier for upcoming managers to take up their part of this shared responsibility. There are sufficient details about how to become a learner, what to learn, and which diverse experiences to pursue on the path to becoming an effective leader.The second theme is that perspectives on leadership must broaden. At its heart, leadership involves insightfulness about oneself and other people, and not just the ability to run a function, business unit, or organization. Running oneself and leading others calls for an array of abilities which are not genetic and can be developed. For example, confidence, self-awareness, and personal leadership commitments must be evolved in order to deploy oneself as a leader. Similarly, know-how about managing and motivating subordinates, gaining influence, and navigating politics must be learned for functioning effectively in the world of people. This is in addition to the functional and technical knowledge that is typically learned in business schools and executive education programs, such as business strategy, finance, marketing, logistics, and human resource management.The third theme is that if businesses want more and better leaders more quickly, the focus of leadership development will have to shift toward exposing future leaders to a diversity of experiences rather than proposing checklists of leadership competencies against which leadership talent is assessed. The former approach is genuinely developmental and will build the pipeline of leadership talent that organizations so badly want; the latter approach emphasizes selection processes, placing the burden of proof of leadership competence on individual managers.Abhijit: How about global HR heads for MNCs – how can they use this info?Meena: Many seminal ideas about leadership and leadership development have their roots in research conducted by North American and European scholars in western business organizations. This book folds in perspectives from Indian business leaders, and extends and complements the knowledge gleaned from North America and Europe-based research.For four decades, U.S. based social scientists have known that there are key events from which critical leadership lessons are learned. The 70-20-10 thumb rule—derived from a suite of studies on learning from experience—suggests that companies should provide a mix of 70% of challenging assignments, 20% of developmental relationships, and 10% of coursework and training to emerging leaders.Recent studies in Asia update these ratios to 65-30-5, but validate that challenging assignments are central to unlocking leadership potential. The Asia-based studies also enrich our understanding of which challenging assignments are the most essential: new initiatives, turnarounds or fix-its, job rotations and transitions, international assignments, and promotions continue to impart the most important leadership lessons. Further, the studies add nuanced insights about how to lead and manage not only in India, but in a business in any part of the world.For example, launching a new initiative is a particularly potent source of leadership learning because self-awareness is gained, the art of navigating organizational politics is honed, and valuable understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship accrues. As another example, executives working in countries where people with status and authority are greatly respected have to recognize that guidance from bosses and superiors is expected and valued. (This is less likely to be the case in a Western organization.) A developmental relationship with a boss or superior may be the single most important leadership development intervention needed. As a final example, the India data turns up a surprising nugget: what Indian subordinates most need from their work experiences may be a confidence boost. Almost ½ of all executives participating in the India study talked about gaining confidence from handling a powerful experience.The word “global,” when incorporated into managerial titles as is currently in vogue, calls on the title holder to contextualize leadership development. The stories in these pages help global HR heads of multinational companies to grasp the Indian context.------------Currently, Meena is part of a team of  researchers from the Center for Creative Leadership (Colorado Springs, Pune, and Jamshedpur) that is working with researchers from the Indian School of Business (Hyderabad) and XLRI (Jamshedpur) to investigate succession management practices across a cross-section of organizations: homegrown Indian and foreign MNCs; family owned and operated businesses; and government companies.You can read the CCL Blog here