Leadership roles and processes facilitate setting direction, creating alignment, and maintaining commitment in groups of people who share common work. It entails the expansion of collective capacity to produce direction, alignment, and commitment. However, how leadership is learned from experience with how the entire systems are crafted, refined, and enhanced over time explains the essence of design in the process. It is pertinent to note that for a worthwhile effort, there must be a significant shift in leadership development from a top-down instruction-based approach to developing leaders through workable organisational systems and design.
This article will proceed to discuss another strategic step required for the development of leaders in an organisation. In cultivating leadership, we need attractiveness for the development process to succeed. There are just a few of the researchers discovering the correlation between attractiveness and success. These groups noted that a single standard deviation in attractiveness gave an elected official a 20% increase in their chances of electoral success. This research is relevant to the generation of leaders because, in almost all cases, followers choose their leaders. When a group of people dislike a leader appointed to lead them, systems break down.
A leader must be attractive, but physical beauty is not the sole factor in determining attractiveness. Physical beauty, charisma, authenticity, integrity, and intelligence all further the concept of leader attractiveness. Every prospective leader can make improvements in each of these areas on their own. The organisation that is helping train leaders should make efforts to help leaders improve in these areas.
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leadership in your organisation
Leaders must maintain the cooperation of their followers because leadership is an exchange between two or more people. Once a leader has been able to attract a follower, they must keep the follower. Followers are also kept through attractiveness. For example, if a leader has only the appearance of integrity and intelligence, the leader may attract followers initially. Over time, the leader will begin to lose good faith based on their failures. It is therefore crucial that leaders be able to not only attract but retain followers. An organisation could aid in boosting attractiveness through setting dress and hygiene codes, teaching social interaction skills, assisting the aspiring leader to make sure their actions and internal beliefs are in alignment, and helping new leaders become avid learners. A new book and a toothbrush will do wonders for a fledgling leader.
Another strategic step in cultivating leadership is our perspective of leadership. Viewing leadership as a collective phenomenon has several implications for leadership development. Firstly, the leadership culture rather than the individual leader becomes the target for leadership development. However, the goal is to increase the degree to which the collective’s culture produces direction, alignment, and commitment. Secondly, the process includes leader or individual development, relationship development, team development, organisation development, changes in the pattern of behaviour in the collective and changes in organisational systems and design. A large force in shaping culture is the stories that circulate through the organisation, and these stories illustrate extreme manifestations of the culture. Nordstrom, one of the most successful retailers in the United States, has a robust culture centred on customer service. This culture is reflected in stories of regular employees who went beyond their call of duty to serve the customer by becoming legends and heroes. They never underestimate their leadership decided to create a climate conducive to the respect and inclusion of all social identities.
As we advance, the comparison among leadership development, organisational culture and the various leadership approaches take us to the context of organisational systems that enhance leadership development by leading oneself through self-awareness, learning engines, values and managing conflicts, leading others through relationships, communication skills, and coaching and leading the organisation through management skills, intuitive skills, and strategic thinking. All point towards the skills and traits approach of leadership embedded in organisational culture that created the systems of continuous development of leaders. So, when leaders develop other leaders, a virtuous cycle is created and the network of relationships increases. Often, there is more and more pressure to accelerate how leaders learn, grow, and develop within the context of social identity since everybody has a social identity. Hence, for leaders to build leadership capabilities, organisations must account for social identity dynamics during the design of leadership development systems and acknowledge the importance of social identity by reviewing and restricting systemic influences through an inclusive organisational culture.
Often, people who do not fit the identity of a dominant group leave or are rejected from the organisation. Issues of prejudice keep leaders with atypical backgrounds from getting needed development opportunities, and culture blocks people from being part of informal networks and the behind-the-scenes relationships. So, avoiding these cultural vices is critical to the effective development and nurturing of leaders.
In conclusion, modern literature supports the idea that building leaders are a chaotic endeavour, full of risks and rewards. Leadership is a complex phenomenon that requires learning rather than academic instruction. The most prominent decision organisations must make whether to encourage managers or leaders. Managers require skills that can mostly be taught theoretically, but leaders require the right kind of environment to test their abilities as leaders. The method I have put forth is simple and applicable in most organisations seeking to train leaders. The method leaves ample room for organisational customization and chaos generation, two components that make it valuable for creating precisely tailored leaders.
