Converting Existing Managers into Future Ready Leaders Mohinish Sinha – Director, Hay Group

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Gurgaon, Haryana, India, Republic of (Free-Press-Release.com) January 13, 2012 -- For future-ready leaders, there is a critical need for organizations to convert their existing managers into leaders who can leverage their team’s potential and ensure a proactive workforce. Companies need to redefine their business models, customer relationship models, and workforce models to translate future business expectations into results.

To quote a CEO I recently met: “I am clear about what we need to do to achieve our growth goals, but we need our middle, senior and top level managers to lead this organization to the future. Our organization is not future ready”.

The challenges here lie in converting existing managers into future-ready leaders:

The line managers don’t get it: For the line manager, conducting business is supreme, while activities such as leadership development are “competition”. Here, “communication and buy-in” is rarely enough. The real answer is to mandate development and get the line manager to perceive it as a pre-requisite to successful operations, by driving home its business benefits. Hay Group research reveals that a leader’s leadership style is directly responsible for 70% of the team’s working environment, which in turn accounts for 30% of the variation in the leader’s business results.

The learners don’t get it: “To know and not to do, is not yet to know.” I was struck by how aptly this Zen thought defines a majority of learners who assume that knowing the concept is as good as applying it; therefore, there is nothing left to learn. There is a critical need for robust data to provide a “mirror” to the learner in the leadership development process. However, the eye-opener was a conversation with the learner interpreting this data vis-à-vis the organization’s present and future vision, as well as his/her personal vision. This meaningful conversation commits the learner to the process and cultivates a feeling of ownership.

Old style organization processes: The preferred leadership style in India is a combination of directive, affiliative and “pace-setting” styles, which results in a “follow-the-leader” workforce, where employees are not trained to think but simply to wait for instructions. The onus for thinking rests with a select team, resulting in a business risk to organizational growth. Moreover, the organizational system is of fault finding, rather than facilitating causal analysis, which discourages learners from developing into innovative leaders for fear of going “against the grain”. What leadership development needs is an enabling environment, infused with the organization’s support. One organization made the learner team members responsible for “designing newer business planning and reporting process”, while another set up regular catch-up dinner meetings of the learners with the sponsor team.

Learners give up along the way: Most learners tend to give up or get distracted at the top of the learning cycle. One learner from the top management team, who had never challenged a particularly vociferous CEO’s views before, now learned to express his point of view skilfully and responsibly. But when faced with a real-life situation, he froze; fearing this would upset the CEO. He gave up learning, rationalizing that these skills do not work in the real life. A strong coach can lead the learner through this part of the cycle, until the learner is able to take action consistently. Peer coaching and peer support groups can also help the learner to find courage to stay the course.

Leaders are not “naturally innovative”: Being innovative boils down to the three skills of observation, reflection and imagination in managing complex situations. Currently, corporate leaders, solve problems based on analyses because they assume that present and future behavior is pre-determined by historical data. Research, however, disputes this and proves the need for leaders to develop the skill of “abductive reasoning” credited to Charles Sanders Pierce; smart leaders build on the inference from an insufficient data set and eventually find a solution that truly works.

Combined with the visioning style of leadership, the coaching style of leadership has the power to drive a paradigm shift in the way organizations function.

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