Which outcome do you want to see more of in your leaders?

Via five short articles, we’ll explore the choices at hand, when thinking about deploying leadership development support in the year ahead. This first dilemma relates to the outcome you need more of in your organisation: Individual leadership energy or consistent leadership behaviour?

Reading time: 1 minute

Let’s start with the end in mind.

What is it that you want more of? What will be happening in your organisation as a result of developing your leaders?

Leadership is endlessly individual, and the most effective leaders are authentic to their true self. Many leaders take inspiration from role models, but the real challenge can be to unbridle the purpose and passion within each leader.

So to liberate individual energy in leadership, you might choose to:

• Deploy psychometric profiling to create more self-awareness.
• Invest in individual coaching to help people overcome inner barriers to acting on their beliefs.
• Develop creative thinking capabilities to allow new ideas to be generated and spread.

On the other hand, organisations can benefit from a strong shared culture, which is helped when there is some consistency in how leaders show up. As people move around the organisation they can enjoy being able to rely on what their leaders can do for them, and predict what leaders will ask of them.

To nurture more consistent leadership behaviour, you might choose to:

• Develop a leadership capability framework, and work with leaders to show the behaviours desired from their role.
• Deploy common development programmes that spread a common language and shared concepts.

Neither is right or wrong, but if you had to say which of these was your bigger focus in the year ahead, which would it be?

As always, we’re here to help. And if this is a choice you’re working through, we’d love to chat.

Tim Janisch

Director of Leadership and Team Development

[email protected]

Explore more leadership development dilemmas:

• Leadership development dilemma #2: Broad reach or deeper impact? – Read here
• Leadership development dilemma #3: Push content or remove barriers? – Read here
• Leadership development dilemma #4: Human-facilitated or Tech-enabled learning? – Read here
• Leadership development dilemma #5: Off-the-shelf or custom design? – Read here