18 Jan New Year, New Leaders: What Should a Development Path Look Like?
We’ve all seen the statistics — coaching your leaders is important and impactful, and provides real return on investment.
So it’s the beginning of the year, and you see an opportunity to be intentional about fostering growth and development among your team.
You’ve made it this far. You’re ready to pull the trigger and support your leaders.
But what does that process look like?
Every organization is different. But at Talent Suite, here is our ideal roadmap to developing a team of leaders based on what we’ve seen succeed:
- Build self-awareness with a behavioral analytic
If you try to skip straight to coaching your leaders, it can be ineffective. In Talent Suite’s experience, it’s best to begin by building a foundation and establishing a common language to use when discussing topics with your team that can be a bit touchy.
That’s why we recommend beginning the process by introducing a behavioral analytic, conducting a feedback survey of your employees, or both if the situation calls for it. A behavioral analytic — The Predictive Index, for example — will help give you and your entire team a baseline of self-analysis that establishes how you work best and how you can improve.
Most people aren’t good at giving or receiving feedback. So it’s extremely helpful that these tools also help everyone involved understand the way to speak to one another constructively. A survey or behavioral analytic won’t fix your entire organization in one step, but it’s an important foundation to provide the necessary tools to your team, and it will set up everything that comes next.
- Establish a leader cohort for a leadership program
Step two is to identify the leaders in your organization who could benefit from a leadership development program. At Talent Suite, we work with our clients to identify the members of their team who should become part of that cohort.
It’s important to continue to continually build out the toolbox your leaders can rely on. You’ll need to fill that toolbox with skills and leadership models that keep them growing, learning and engaged.
Talent Suite has a leadership development program that focuses on :
- Engaging in healthy conflict
- Communicating with empathy
- Creating accountability
- Delivering feedback
- And much more
Within these cohorts, you can begin to individualize the work with different leaders, figuring out what their path forward looks like depending on that leader’s personal journey.
- Introduce Professional Coaching
For those leaders who want or need to continue the leadership journey, professional business coaching creates a dynamic and strategic partnership designed to empower individuals within an organization to maximize their potential and achieve success.
Talent Suite’s professional coaching programs have four main goals:
- Individual empowerment: Unleashing the full potential of leaders by identifying and building on their strengths, while developing self-awareness and impression management.
- Skill enhancement: Develop and refine essential skills, ensuring alignment with organizational objectives and industry best practices. Modify specific behaviors that may be blocking or stalling career growth. Gain coping skills needed for their role or a new or changed position.
- Leadership development: Cultivate effective leadership qualities that enable your team to navigate challenges and inspire others. Build influence with team, peers and higher-level leaders in the organization.
- Goal attainment: Facilitate the creation of clear, achievable goals that align with personal and the organization’s aspirations. Consistently exhibit a positive professional image through behaviors
The end result of this coaching plan is enhanced performance, optimized leadership, improved team dynamics and sustainable growth. Professional coaching can help eliminate professional issues that undermine success, give your leaders and team a competitive edge, foster a collaborative and productive work environment and serve as a catalyst for long-term growth.
- Understand that development doesn’t end
Growth and leadership are never a one-and-done experience.
Depending on where you are personally or professionally, even if you’ve already experienced all these steps before, you will inevitably have new tools and support that you need or could benefit from.
Major change in an organization, new roles, life events or personal changes can all trigger a good time to re-engage in one or multiple steps in this process, maintaining the accountability and growth mindset that they introduced in the first place. Talent Suite’s approach is flexible and custom to what you and your organization needs. If you’d like to discuss what a year of leadership development and coaching looks like, please reach out! We would love to develop a plan that serves your business.