What is leadership development?

So let’s talk about it.  What is leadership development?

At BREWYD we have a strong opinion because… well this is all we do.  

Our approach to leadership development is heavily focused on facts, we don’t believe in fluff or bullshit.  We’re unashamedly all consumed with figuring out the most hyped up career in the history of careers:  Leadership.

Yes, being a leader is a career - just like a doctor, a nurse, a plumber or an accountant.  You can choose it or you can find yourself in it.  And as you begin to build your career as a leader – or the careers of those around you – the question becomes: How do you create consistent high-performance in yourself and your organisation?

The first step is to take this transition seriously. 

Gone are the days where bringing in an external speaker to motivate your team is enough.  World Champion athletes are inspirational and academics who share theories of leadership are knowledgeable, but it’s the application and commitment to implementation that underpins the keynote that’s essential. 

Frameworks and stories of accomplishments that are never integrated into your operating model are simply... great ideas.  Ideas that people reference, some may even try to action.  But the reality is most people forget them and what you thought was going to change your life remains, an idea.

Today’s future leaders need to develop their leadership career in the same way we teach and advance any other pursuit:

• With a clear, focused and consistent plan that’s reinforced with a deep understanding of what’s required of people in leadership
• With knowledge and an implementation strategy to develop people into these roles
• With recruitment strategies to ensure companies aren’t just looking externally to fill leadership roles, and are building a strong pipeline of candidates from within their organisation

At BREWYD we break leadership development down into three key areas:

1. Current leadership development
2. Future leadership development
3. Recruitment processes that identify Individual Contributors (ICs) that could be future leaders

Each of these areas require enormous amounts of strategy, implementation and change in their own right, so we will focus on one at a time.  In this edition of Crafting High-Performance, we’re taking on Current Leadership Development.

Current Leadership Development takes many different forms across organisations. 

The best organisations in the world have very clear strategies on how they develop their leaders.  As a result, their leadership programs are laser focused on identifying what layer of responsibility the leader will sit within the organisation, and the required components to coach and guide within that layer. 

It’s also vital that your workforce strategy has a purposeful leadership component.  

Let’s explain using the example of a classically designed sales business unit within a commercial organisation.  As you work through this, think about how this may work within your organisation or government department by reimagining your structure and the relevant roles and their functions.

Imagine a global sales organisation that has a Global Sales Leader, a Regional Sales Leader responsible for a multiple countries, a Country Sales Leader responsible for a specific country and a Sales Leader that manages Individual Contributors (ICs) within that country.

When it comes to hierarchies like this, there are some typical errors we see with leadership development and the supporting programs.  We see organisations:

1. Assuming that every role requires the same leadership skills so they use the same programs to develop people at every layer of the organisation
2. Not identifying the critical success factors of each of these layers, meaning leaders aren’t developed in alignment with success factors – the result is a vanilla approach to leadership development
3. Missing common traits or skills across layers, and because they aren’t identified they can’t be factored in or coached
4. Promote leaders from one layer to the next based on their performance in their previous role, without understanding they might not excel in the new role – and why that may be the case
5. Miss the opportunity to provide programs that support leaders transitioning between layers
6. Overlook that some leaders will have dual layer roles where they manage Individual Contributors and manage accounts themselves. These dual layer roles are the hardest to be successful in and organisations don’t work hard enough to get rid of them

 

So where do organisational leadership development programs need to start? 

At BREWYD we look at what each layer requires from leadership roles to be successful.

What traits are required?  What are the common skills they execute on?  How can you ensure you’re constantly developing people to be better at their role?  How do you measure their effectiveness with simple data metrics around the skills they require for execution?

Let’s use our example to explain.

The Sales Leader

The Sales Leader is in fact the most critical role in your leadership chain. 

This role is responsible for ensuring that your Individual Contributors (ICs) are performing at their best and is therefore heavily focused on coaching  - very little of what people would consider traditional leadership skills are required. 

Sales Leaders are responsible for managing the activity and the quality of that activity every day.  They must ensure that IC’s feel engaged with the organisation and that they are listening to client feedback so they can push it up the chain to senior leadership. 

Managing data entry from their team is also a key responsibility because at this level, Sales Leaders rarely have the need for data as they are so close to the business.  They need to ensure the data is entered for senior leaders to gain insight into the overall business, as they often don’t have the luxury of being close to the font line. 

But be cautious.  Sales Leaders can play a role in manipulating data so the powers above don’t insist on new actions or campaigns based on low pipelines!

At this level of the leadership chain, coaching sales execution and being engaged in the sales process are the priorities of the Sales Leader.   

The Country Leader

The Country Leader will start to play a different leadership role. 

The most critical element of their role is coaching the Sales Leader on how to embed a good operating model that includes how to conduct One-on-Ones, what a successful team meetings looks like, how to develop strong recruitment skills, conducting operation review presentations and data analysis. 

Country Leaders work with Learning and Development teams to coach Sales Leaders on specific areas that have been uncovered in the pipeline analysis - the areas of the sales process where their team members are falling down.  Examples include challenges booking meetings, handling objections, understanding how to engage decision makers, closing opportunities and how to identify those pesky manipulations of data by the Sales Leader.

Establishing relationships with the other business unit leaders is also critical for Country Leaders.  They may play a role as the “face” of the organisation for their country, requiring them to attend industry events, talk to journalists and ensure that nothing stands in the way of their Sales Leaders running high-performing sales teams.

The role will tend to be very execution focused and likely have limited client engagement.  A key part of the role is to execute on the global strategy.

We call this role, the Coach of Coaches. 

Very different skills are required for the role of Country Leader – and typically, it’s at this point people have their a-ha! moment.  Promoting people into the role of Country Leader, simply because they’ve been successful Sales Leader, might be the very reason the organisation can’t keep people in this role.

The Regional Leader

This leader now starts to have more of a role in running broader marketing campaigns and begins to shift their focus internally rather than externally. 

The Regional Leader is who the CEO and Global Sales Leader look to for input into the development of strategy, restructures and front line input into the quarterly commitments given to external investors. 

Organisations see Regional Leaders as critical when understanding the complexities that come from varying cultures, changing legal requirements for commercial and employment law and look to them to gain input on global initiatives that may be impacting the company. 

Regional Leaders will own taking the global culture and localising it, whilst ensuring alignment with the global company.  On the practical side of things, these leaders will most likely be the final step in approvals for sales exceptions within their region.

The role of a Regional Leader is again, extremely different to the roles below it and takes different skills and traits to be successful.  Suddenly interactions and requirements with clients and prospects are based on feedback from the leaders below them and business intelligence tools.

The Global Sales Leader

Now we’re at the link in the chain that has the greatest impact on strategy and the operations of the organisation - and in a lot of cases, may even be the future CEO. 

The Global Sales Leader will be responsible for contributing to how the company is run, what products are developed, what sales systems are used, the types of recognition programs they run and the sales process and methodologies they subscribe to. 

There is very little coaching of the layer below them and apart from being wheeled in to do high value client engagement, Global Sales Leaders will probably be very unaware of how IC’s conduct basic processes like create proposal or even book an order. 

The Global Sales Leaders are hyper focused on engaging Sales Leaders as this is their entry point to execution, and in most cases will place more emphasis on this role than any other to rapidly scale strategy and execution.

So as you can see, using this simple example of a standard sales business, every leadership role is very different.  It is critical to understand this and is an essential factor in how you construct your leadership development programs. 

Sounds great!  So where do you start?

Skills – Developing the operating model

It starts with analysis.  BREWYD gives you access to tools that make it easy for you to identify the operating model of star performers at each layer of the hierarchy and then compares these models to lower level performers.

We call this Ethnographic Research – you need to spend time in the field understanding what top leaders do at each layer, how they construct their relationships internally, how they engage with their clients and how they map their engagement model with their clients and the leaders below them.

Measures – Measure the skills

Next you need to look at how you will measure these skills in a very simple way.  At BREWYD we really drive home the importance of not using too much data when leading teams.

Start with a few measure until you become “Datafit” – that’s when you’ve habitually implemented the essential metrics within the business and you’re on your way to your desired future state.

Then add a few more.  Slowly.  One at a time. 

When implementing metrics, particularly in sales teams, it’s important to make sure you measure quantifiable events when dealing with human behaviours  and capture data that leads to accurate decision making.  Think of our example of a sales team and the pipeline behaviours you can measure, things like a booking an initial meeting or the acceptance of a proposal.

Traits – What kind of people are good at this?

A trait is a distinguishing quality or characteristic that is inherent in a person – you can coach a skill, but you can’t coach a trait.    

BREWYD uses traits based theory because it helps us to identify the personality profiles of the people considered top performers in your organisation.  From analysis you’ll see that there are some common traits amongst top performers in particular roles – you’ll want to have them as base traits. 

But it is important to acknowledge that not all star performers are exactly the same.  And remember - you can’t coach traits, you can only learn how to identify them. This is the most critical - yet hardest - part of the high-performance organisation.

So the question is:  How can we recruit and promote based on the person and not just the performance?

At BREWYD we use Red Bull tools to help you on this journey, specifically Wingfinder – a profiling tool that helps individuals uncover their strengths.  We then apply the science behind BREWYD’s High-Performance Programs to build high-performing teams.

Knowledge – How do we ensure we keep developing these people?

Now it’s time to start developing your leadership program, ensuring you know how to identify the people you want in future leadership programs, and what skills and operating model you want to coach.  The goal is to ensure your leaders are always getting better at every level of leadership.

Organisations will have people operating and leading at multiple layers, but be warned – if you keep doing this you will fail.  It takes different people and different phases in their leadership journey to be successful at each layer.

You’ll no doubt be starting to understand that effective leadership development programs must be purposeful and targeted in what they ask each layer to do – and what kind of people they promote and recruit into these roles and programs.

And as fun as they can be, successful leadership development isn’t just a retreat in the mountains filled with inspirational keynotes. 

Leadership development programs are a massive amount of intentional work, requiring dedication to creating a career path for the leaders in your organisation. 

And when done right, leadership programs will have more impact on your organisation’s performance than anything else. 

Let’s go Break Records!