Transforming Managers into Leaders Ready for Strategic Action

There are almost as many definitions of leadership as there are people who have attempted to define the concept. According to John Kotter of Harvard Business School, management is about coping with complexity and leadership is all about coping with change.

Good management brings about order and consistency by drawing up formal plans, designing rigid organization structures, and monitoring results against plan. On the other hand, leaders establish direction by developing a vision of the future: then they align people by communicating this vision and inspiring them to overcome hurdles. Peter Drucker has long pointed out that managers are people who do things right; leaders are people who do the right things. However, for a company to be under led and over managed could be as dangerous as for a company to be over led and under managed; therefore, the ideal is a combination of solid management and clever leadership.

Leadership can be better understood if we focus on various roles performed by the leaders. In his book “General Manager Performance", Kotter has mentioned that all effective general managers were found to be ambitious, achievement orientated, comfortable with power, emotionally stable, temperamentally optimistic, above average in intelligence, moderately strong, analytically and intuitively strong, personable, good at developing relationships with people and able to relate to a broad set of business specialists. They were also very knowledgeable about their businesses and organizations, and have set of good working relationships with a very large number of people in their companies.

These competencies can be classified into two categories.
Surface Elements of Competencies
This involves skills and knowledge required to perform the managerial work. These kinds of competencies can be easy amended for development

Core Elements of Competencies
This involves core motives, traits, behavior, characteristic features and attitudes. These kinds of competencies are relatively difficult to amend for development.

The leading companies in the west have come to realize that ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantages are through leaders who keep learning. Hence these companies are investing in leadership development programs that help key executives learn leadership skill. As early as 1993, Business Week estimated that $17 billion was being spent annually on helping managers develop thought processes and company special skill that could enable them to move up and lead their business areas. Besides making huge investment world-class executives are investing significant amount of their time, personally guiding and mentoring future leaders. These world-class executives consider leadership development not a luxury but a strategic necessity.

The Sloan Management Review, Fall 2000 has summarized leadership development practices adopted by most of the Fortune 100 organizations into basic five steps.

Awareness
The foundation of these companies' leadership development is awareness of external challenges, emerging business opportunities and strategies, internal developmental needs and the ways other leading organizations handle development.

Anticipatory
Top leadership-development companies use anticipatory learning tools such as focus groups that explore potential challenges or the impact of emerging technologies strategic; decentralized strategic (planning that builds on many organizational levels' imagining of the future); Analysis of future scenarios and the Delphi methods (successive rounds of composite predictions used to build awareness and consensus).

Action
Action, not knowledge, is the goal of best practice leadership development processes. They believe that answers to tough questions are not in the instructor head; learner should discover them on the spot. Before the course begins the firm gives participants real life business problems and protocol for interviewing the clients. Learners work in a team to develop client recommendations and make a presentation to the actual clients after the course.

Aligning
The best practice organization integrate and align the leadership development with other corporate functions like assessment, development, feedbacks, coaching, education and succession planning.

Assessing
Finally, the best practice organizations always assess the impact of leadership development process by using numbers of tools and techniques like Kirk Patrick four level model of evaluations, etc.

Some of the leadership development programs that can be undertaken are as follows:

• Initially the leadership needs have to be identified and programs to fulfill these needs should be formulated.
• Formal education to the potential candidates to increase their understanding of environment and to develop confidence to take charge of the position should be encouraged.
• Coaching, counseling, mentoring and seminars should be conducted to refine the surface as well as core elements of competencies.
• The organization can also encourage job rotation of the viable candidates to increase the width of business expansion.
• Conduct self-assessment programs to find out the potential of the employees and introduce career development programs based on such assessment.
• Provide continuous inspirational programs to motivate the staff to encourage managers to take responsibility for their own development.
• The management can also have junior boards to encourage team experience and develop leadership quality in the staff.

Although the development of special assets in top managers will take very long time, it will invariably take the organization a long way. After all the top managers were not "made" overnight, nor were they simply "born". They are developed over many years.