Quickest Way to Develop Leadership Skills

I am a strong believer that leadership can be learned.  While you may be born with personality traits that can help you be an effective leader, most of the skills are learned and honed through years of "doing leadership". 

The Problem:  Companies (generally) do a poor job of developing leaders.  Yes, your company may have the requisite training classes that you attend as part of your development plan...then you go back to your day job with little ability to hone the skills you learned because of the scope of your current position.  Also, companies tend to be reactive, focusing leadership training on individuals only after they have attained a level of management responsibility.  (Sidebar: leadership in companies tends to get attributed to the organization chart.  Whoever is at the top of the pyramid is the leader.  Don't confuse positional management responsibility with the ability to lead people and organizations.)

The Solution:  What you can do to develop your ability to lead people and organizations:

1. Check your motivation.  It is OK to be ambitious, seeking and desiring leadership.  Your leadership ambition should to serve others.  Selfish ambition is wrong - don't seek great things for yourself.  If you believe leadership is getting others to serve you, then you will always fall short.
2. Find problems to solve. Your company is full of problems that people don't want to touch.  Seek out high risk problems and volunteer to solve them.  Do this as a special project, outside the scope of your day job and, preferably, for an executive that is not your current manager.  Build a coalition of volunteers across your company (not just in your work group) that are willing to tackle the tough issue.
3. Lead volunteer organizations or projects.  Look outside your company and get involved in community, charitable, religious, or other local organizations.  It is one thing to manage people that work for you (i.e. get a paycheck from you), but it is entirely different to lead people who volunteer their time and talents.  Personally, I think this is the best way to develop and hone leadership skills and develop people acumen because the people serving with you can walk away at anytime.  Employees must do the work.  Volunteers don't have to serve.
4. Spend more time doing.  There is no substitute for doing, but "do" with a focus on application of what you learned, predicting outcomes, studying the results, and making plans for next actions (hmm, sounds like a PDSA cycle).  Grab a good leadership book (John Maxwell has a bunch of them), do a little reading, then build and execute a plan to develop a specific leadership skill.
5. Get a mentor.  A key skill of leaders is to reproduce leaders.  Leadership training is best suited for one-on-one relationships.  Leaders are produced one by one, not mass manufactured from a top-tier MBA program or a company leadership training program.  A good leader will take time to instruct, enlighten, discipline, and nurture an aspiring leader on an individual basis.  Find one.  Get engaged.

There is nothing holding you back from quickly developing the skills and preparing the opportunities to lead.  What actions are you taking today to build your leadership skills?

Comments

[Alexander Tiedemann]

Being a leader must be hard, since they're always busy. I agree that having selfish ambitions is wrong and these will be one's undoing. Reproducing leaders is a good idea, since your business/group/organization will be easier to manage that way.