How do you align your leadership development goals with your organization's strategy?

While acknowledging strengths is important in a personal leadership assessment, I believe that recognizing, exploring and addressing weaknesses is the most effective path to improved performance for the benefit of both the individual and the organization.

I strongly urge you to seek a 360-degree assessment from an Emotional Intelligence Practitioner. The assessment will include the de-briefing from the Coach. Options for skill enhancement should be discussed.

One thing I found helpful when establishing the current reality is to ask yourself: - How long have you been thinking about this? - How often do you think about this? - What's one word that describe how you are feeling right now? - How important is it to you on a scale of 1 to 10? - Are you close to an answer already or are you at the start of your thinking?

I have found that the Leadership Circle Profile 360 along with various self-assessments such as the MBTI, FIRO-B, Insights, Career Leader help create a good 'self' and 'coaching' conversation for evaluating and determining good 'next-step' professional development needs and opportunities. Knowing yourself first and how others see you are important first self-awareness steps ... before determining additional professional development opportunities and training which will fit the individual as well as organization's purpose.

The 1st step is to adopt the Postindustrial leadership paradigm offered by Joseph C. Rost, Ph.D., in his groundbreaking book, “Leadership for the Twenty-First Century.” Rost defined leadership as a relationship among leaders and followers who become collaborators who use mutual influence to co-create changes to satisfy their mutual purposes. Leadership development shifts its focus from teaching people how to impose their will on others to equipping people with collaborative skills such as reaching a consensus, and co-creating innovations with agility. Today’s fluid and complex business environment requires interdependent actions for maximum impact and influence. Command and control approaches are inadequate to influence a matrix.

Your plan for leadership development is a transformation plan. You are transforming from your current level of leadership to your next level. Your current level has a mindset, toolset, and skillset. Your next level will change each of these. You need to know something new to become something new (mindset). A new mindset will open you up for refreshing your leadership toolset. A refresh of your toolset can be a recommitment to your current tools, adding new tools, retiring existing tools, modifying how your tools work together. Full adoption of your new mindset and toolset requires enough of a skillset to give you the confidence to operate your leadership at this new level.

An effective leadership development strategy answers the question "what skills do we need in order to achieve our mission?" This ensures that learning efforts are tied to business outcomes.

Make a list of the people who have an opinion that matters about how you use your time each day, week, month, quarter, year. List the role you play and they play in each relationship. List the expectations that you have for them in their role and the expectations you think they have of you in the role you play for them. Then clarify and negotiate as needed these expectations.

A global best in class practice is to invest in a validated, reliable 360 Multi-Rater Survey which provides an opportunity to invite internal and external stakeholders including clients, to assess your leadership effectiveness, from the perspective of others. This provides you an accurate picture of your reputation, which is determined by others. A useful, short video on this important topic, is found online at https://www.hoganassessments.com/thought-leadership/the-hogan-360/

Bringing multiple opinions from key stakeholders provides the foundation to a successful implementation process. You don't want to just push a new agenda of leadership development onto the team; you want to create a space for people to feel aligned with the goals and empowered to bring them to life.

It has been my experience in over 50 years of leading that the single most important first step in leadership development is looking in a mirror and assessing one's behavioral strength. Once an individual understands what "makes him/her tick" and articulates that, the road to self improvement becomes clear. My suggestion is to have each leader take the www.MyHardWired.com 3-dimensional behavioral assessment to differentiate one's traits from steady-state daily activity to reaction under stress. One's understanding these dynamics will set the course for personal improvement.

In my experience, this is often-times the step people either overlook or avoid altogether. Just as it was necessary to complete a self-assessment at the beginning of your leadership development journey, it is also necessary to conduct regular progress checks. Simple reviews should be conducted on a regular basis with in-depth reviews being done quarterly and MEGA reviews annually. I remember long ago when I worked on large ships. When I worked wheel watch, I would have to check my course on the radar and make little adjustments but sometimes big ones. Why did I need to adjust the course? Because when you are the Captain of the ship, failing to evaluate and adjust course can be catastrophic.

If one’s conception of leadership development is leader-centric, one will seek training that will likely be inadequate to address both the current and probable future organizational demands. Reimaging leadership as collaboration in action is an excellent guide to equip people to be effective collaborators who use mutual influence to create significant changes and problem-solve. Shifting to a Postindustrial leadership paradigm offers the most hope for successful organizational transformations that can keep up with the speed of change in our world.