Improving Leadership Skills Is Only The Beginning

Leadership is a word that is difficult to define. You'll hear senior managers talk about leading their organizations to success, middle managers talk about leadership skills, and employees often criticize their bosses for not being good leaders. What does it really boil down to? Whether or not you believe that someone can be trained to be a leader depends on how you define leadership and being a leader.

If leadership to you is about having a combination of skills, behaviors and traits that would allow individuals to have an influence over others, then the answer to whether or not there's a way to train new leaders is likely "no." But if you see it as the combination of tangible knowledge and real-life approaches, then the answer is "yes".

In leadership training and development programs, the standard definition tends to be the first one, with very few giving any bit of importance to the element in the second definition. Year after year, programs have focused on coaching and mentoring, leading teams, managing conflict and collaboration, creating engagement and commitment, awareness of your own behavior and style, and dealing with power and politics.

Although those areas are useful in training leaders, it's a very narrow part of leadership. This flies in the face of what CEOs argue constitutes a good leader - someone who can gather the firm's resources successfully, repeatedly and in different ways that can enable the organization to make money in a constantly changing industry. Successful leadership depends on the manager's ability to create and capture value and profits, showing the ultimate measures of a leader's success.

If you're a senior manager looking for a "leadership training program" to help mold new leaders, you should consider whether "soft leadership skills" and the like should be more than a quarter of the content. The rest should focus more on concrete themes that will help managers gain a better understanding of how to create and capture value. As a senior manager looking to train leaders, you must insist that the following be in the content of the program:

1. MANAGING RESOURCES

Successful leaders understand a firm's resource strengths and weaknesses, taking into consideration how people, systems and structures need to be in sync for the firm to be able to effectively compete in the industry.

2. CREATING AND SUSTAINING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

They understand how customers define value and are able to shape the firm's value proposition to take advantage of this understanding.

3. STRATEGIC THINKING

They are able to identify problems and issues in their own functional areas and understand the cross-enterprise implications of what solutions they can think of. The reality is that there is no management decision that doesn't touch the issue of finances or vice versa.

4. FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

Successful leaders think of both the qualitative and quantitative implications of their decisions. They know that every decision, big or small, could have important financial implications, and understand them well enough to make value-creating decisions.

Leadership training programs shouldn't just be about giving potential leaders methods on how to improve their LEADERSHIP SKILLS. In order to yield successful new leaders, programs need to take a balanced approach to what it means to lead.

(c) 2012 Incedo Group, LLC

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