LEADERSHIP: BRIDGING FROM TRAINING TO TRACTION

Published: 2009-11-09   please add a comment below

I remember my first skiing lesson.  A cold sunny morning, in a shallow bowl, above the then tiny village of Obertauern in Austria.  A German friend was showing me the basics: standing up, snow-ploughing, turning and so on.  I felt safe and we had the place to ourselves.  But, I remember even more vividly my first attempt to get down the mountain.  The learning didn't seem to work.  I had the theory but no plan for the reality of steeper slopes.  And, for the next week, I made a fool of myself - with much time spent face down in the snow.  Sadly, it's often like that with leadership: what you take from the training sessions doesn't translate quickly enough to the steep slopes of day to day leadership.  So, what can you do?

Many businesses (particularly large ones) have highly structured tools for evaluating technical and leadership competencies.  And, the tools reflect the needs of the particular business and the values and ethos it wants to create.  But, as the saying goes, there's many a slip between cup and lip - or, in my case, many a face-down between peak and valley.

Senior leaders and HR directors often comment to me that much of their leadership training fails to deliver on the ground.  So, what's up?  To my mind, it's the "mountain" problem: good theory; but no plan for the specifics of the real world.  So, how can you close this gap?  Here are three steps I know work well:

1. Identify the concerns holding your people back from full commitment and delivery.   These will depend on the particular people you're leading and their specific challenges.  So, not generalisations but specifics about them and their immediate situation.
2. Shortlist action opportunities for addressing their concerns.  Around market and technical issues and also people and cultural ones.  Effective leadership has to be integrative: working simultaneously on both the "hard" and the "soft" issues.
3. Finally, set out your commitments - the details of your Leadership Action Plan.  The what, with whom and when - so your people understand, trust and follow you.

Facing from the top of the corporation, competencies and values need to be organisation-specific.  But, looking up from below, leadership actions need to be follower-specific.  And the bridge has to be a problem-solving process, as above.  Identifying what your people need and then how to deploy your organisation-driven competencies, values and approaches.  And, that's where V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership® comes in.  It's the bridge - from theory to practice; from leadership training to on-the-job traction.

In contrast, many leadership tools are prescriptive: this is right, that's wrong; this is important, that's not.  But they are fatally flawed.  Supplanting your organisation's values and priorities, while also overriding what your followers need.  A real lose/lose outcome.

If you want to avoid going face-down in the corporate snow, you need something that brings the two together.  Into a Leadership Action Plan that's both credible with your people and true to your organisation's values and training.  And, that's what V|E|C|T|O|R delivers.

Dr. Timothy Pascoe AM
PhD (Cambridge), MBA (Harvard), BE & BEc (Adelaide)
Creator, V|E|C|T|O|R Leadership^®