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Learning & Development

Published August 2007

Leadership Development Through Self-Awareness

David Peck

 

Many organizations invest in some form of leadership development for their top talent — they see it as a way to gain or maintain a competitive advantage.

Competency-based approaches to assess, mentor/coach, plan for succession and even promote leaders are the most common mechanisms for expending those training dollars.

These methods rely on company-selected or pre-established lists of the skills, characteristics or attributes companies consider important in a particular leader. When used wisely, such lists can help them assess, develop and deploy skills in situational contexts, providing valuable feedback and learning experiences for leaders.

Leadership experts are beginning to recognize, however, that competency-based approaches are too static to help leaders master the complexity, speed and turbulence of today's workplace.

In fact, many in the leadership field say we need new strategies to help the next generation of leaders deal with the gale-force winds of change in the global marketplace.

Traditional classes and seminars are giving way to multidimensional approaches that incorporate executive education, nontraditional workshops, team activities, and, most effectively, one-on-one approaches to developing leaders.

Factors Leading to the Demand for Self-Awareness

The role of the leader today — and even more so tomorrow — is to master speed, turbulence and complexity. As baby boomers retire in massive numbers, and organizations look at a potential leadership talent drain of 30 percent or more in the next five years, steep learning curves will be the rule rather than the exception.

Therefore, leaders must have tools that transcend static skills. That means providing many levels of support to encourage them to gain the awareness needed to change dynamically and quickly. Organizations must explicitly place value on the process of maturation of consciousness, a complicated proposition indeed.

Since the 1970s, large organizations have had success creating lists of the skills or attributes they consider important to be a good leader, and there was certainly nothing wrong with this model.

Organizations use (and sometimes misuse) such competency lists and the underlying definitions to test, evaluate and assess leadership at many points, including hiring, readiness for promotion, performance ratings, succession and even overall effectiveness.

When used appropriately, most of the individual skills and competencies are good, but they are no longer enough — they are static. Without a flexible, self-aware operating system, the leader is able to manage only limited complexity, speed and change.

For the few who can go beyond that on their skills alone, either the personal and professional cost can be enormous, or they use tremendous mental resources, and people with that type of pure brain power don't live on a bell curve.