Learning Leaders focus on motivating and developing their people so development and empowerment happen everyday.
By Alistair Lamont, International Practice Director, the alphaeightinstitute
Any good leader will tell you that one of the many secrets to success is planning your own, as well as your team’s, time. The secret of achieving this effectively is in understanding the sub-roles, and results they must produce, that make up your overall leadership role. There are numerous sub-roles that can make up a leader’s overall role. For example, if you are a Sales Director, your sub-roles might include:
- Manager of high net worth accounts
- Sales Strategy Planner
- Financial Forecaster
- Board Director
There is one sub-role however that is often missing and even if it is there, it is hardly ever likened to a key performance indicator, role description, competency, or proper plan with measurable results. That sub-role is ‘Learning Leader’. This seems a little strange because one of the other key components for success as a leader—more than at any other time in the career ladder—is having a great team of well-developed, motivated people to execute things for you.
This is a global issue, however, the problem seems to be especially acute in Asia. In fact, a recent study of Leaders across Asia Pacific, conducted by Korn Ferry, found low scores across Asia in key competencies that involved developing direct reports. This could be for many reasons, and below is a list of common reasons I hear used a lot:
“I had little or no planned development, but I had the desire and I learned by being thrown into projects.” This may have been effective for them—but it is not a comprehensive strategy for people development.
“There is a lot of movement in the market right now—so why bother training people when they are probably going to leave.”
“I don’t have the time anyway. I tell them what to do—they just need to get on with it.”
“That’s the training department’s job.”
“Look I do an annual appraisal and tell them what they are doing wrong.”
“We did some training last year; there should be some budget left over and, if there is, we can do some more.”
As you can see there are lots of assumptions and reasons that your leaders can give to justify not adding the sub-role of Learning Leader, after all there are lots of other duties which need to be carried out. This begs the question: how can I, as an HR leader, influence my leaders to take on this key sub-role of Learning Leader?
Influencing leaders to become Learning Leaders
HR can do several things to help influence leaders to take on the key sub-role of Learning Leaders
Create a framework
Create a framework that will encourage and enable leaders to succeed as Learning Leaders. Create simple templates and work with them individually to develop job descriptions for every role in their team/department that show specific, measurable skills and behaviours that a highly successful person in each role would exhibit. Even if your organisation has these already, it is a good idea to audit them. It is surprising how many companies think they have effective templates, which are, in fact, out of date, too general or ineffective and therefore may not ever be used or taken seriously.
Create and then develop your leaders to utilise a simple monthly meeting agenda based on the above that will enable them to have a discussion with each team member about their strengths and development areas—not KPI results, which leaders should already be managing through other means.
Spring clean
Have a spring clean and audit all the current development materials, suppliers and internal people resources that are available. Fill in the blanks to ensure that information is up-to-date, easy to access and user-friendly.
Get leaders to own it
Get your leaders involved as facilitators and best practice experience sharers in both internal and external training and development activities. Create a Learning Leader team—set them the task of creating a vision and action plan for people development across the departments that can be supported by HR.
Support leaders
Provide support and training on the key skills and behaviours of a Learning Leader. Areas you may want to cover include:
Mindset: from telling to asking, from owning to sharing, from teaching to coaching, from having control to creating accountability, from top-down direction to giving accountability.
Coaching and feedback skills: so that they can consistently—ideally daily—be giving their people timely encourage specific feedback that is coached rather than told by them. Continued regular coaching allows them to make behavioural changes and also helps elicit further feedback.
Support them to create learning goals and challenges: help them to understand the difference between learning goals and performance goals. Show them how to set learning goals that utilise ‘Goldilocks tasks’—that is challenges that are not too hard and not too easy, but just right.
In summary, developing Learner Leaders is a unique challenge, but with careful planning you should be able to create an army of Learning Leaders across your organisation.
For further information visit:
www.alphaeight.com
Paul Arkwright
Publisher
