NYNP blog post 4-13-09

A formula for creating leaders
Revisiting John P. Kotter's "What Leaders Really Do"

In Kotter's article (which I discussed in my prior blog post "Trainers as leaders and managers"), he says that effective leaders often have certain professional experiences in common, which suggests a formula that organizations can use to develop their staff into excellent leaders.

A three-step formula for creating leaders
1) Early in their careers, during their twenties and thirties, effective leaders typically have had the opportunity to face a significant challenge. This gives them the chance to attempt to truly lead, as well as to learn from the positives and negatives of the experience. This learning opportunity is an key ingredient in developing their leadership skills and perspectives. Thus, organizations that are serious about developing leaders provide challenging assignments to relatively young employees.

2) Effective leaders have also generally had the chance to break out of narrow career paths and broaden their knowledge and experiences. This happens through routes such as lateral career moves, early promotions to broad roles, assignments to special task forces, or serious management training courses. Again, organizations that want to develop leaders create these routes to broadening perspectives.

3) Effective leaders have strong networks of internal & external relationships. These networks are essential to successful leadership initiatives. Organizations can support this by offering opportunities to work on teams and build internal relationships, and they can support or encourage time spent on external networking opportunities.

Now is the time to develop leadership
This year, organizations do not have to search far for challenges to provide employees, whether early-career employees who would benefit from a first real leadership opportunity or more experienced employees who would benefit from a chance to broaden perspectives. Nonprofits can create opportunities to exercise leadership and build internal networks by setting up task forces on revenue-generat ion, cost cutting, quality assurance during budget cuts, and staff motivation and retention. In addition, because nonprofits need to collaborate and learn from each other in order to survive this moment in history, they can send employees to knowledge sharing events in the field, which offer networking opportunities and a subsequent chance to teach or lead the organization on what was learned.

How trainers can support the development of leaders
We nonprofit trainers can encourage our organizations to take advantage of the current opportunity to develop leaders. As trainers, we can build an organizational culture of continuing professional development and lifelong learning.

In the nonprofit field, we know that this is the time our communities need us the most. In the same way, as trainers, this is the time our organizations need our unique abilities the most.