OPERATIONAL PRINCIPLES FOR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT (1)

Urgency in the workplace has had a dramatic impact on the velocity of business change. Companies in every industry, not just high-tech, need to accomplish more in less time. The response time available to fend off competitors is approaching zero. The best way for managers to add value is to reduce the time it takes employees to learn and apply the skills and information needed to compete in the new mercurial marketplace. Leadership development must be accelerated. The idea is to create and display ‘expertise’ more efficiently so that we can achieve the aims required by the increasingly demanding organizations. The traditional learning methods are no longer appropriate. The new economy leaders need to learn in different ways, deciding what to learn, when and how.

The method used to develop leadership within this display process becomes especially relevant. Training programs are commonly designed using multiple training techniques and multiple outcome measures (Conger & Benjamin, 1999). Among them, on-the-job training (93%) and external seminars (90%) have usually led the rankings of most frequently utilized methods (Saari, Johnson, Mclaughlin & Zimmerle, 1998). A wide variety of formal training programs are occurring in organizations: formal training continues to be the primary type of managerial leadership development intervention, while job assignment remains a close second (Collins, 2001). In recent times, development through job experiences, such as on-the-job-training, job-performance evaluations and feedback programs, participation in special projects or task forces, coaching or mentoring, job rotation, succession planning, and career planning have emerged as a powerful source of learning for managers (McCauley & Brutus, 1998). Other activities like action learning and 360-degree feedback are increasingly key elements of leadership development initiatives.

Despite this variety of methods and their evident influence on leadership programs, it was not easy to quantify the effectiveness corresponding to each one of them. It even seems that the choice of a type of method is not the most important thing. Day & Halpin (2001) found that the best organizations combined these techniques in some way or other, so that the most effective system actually seemed to be a function of the interdependence of several practices.