Today's modern world requires leadership, rather than management control. Why? The world is changing too quickly for companies to rely on employees waiting to do what they are told or just following procedures. A manager may not be around to tell staff what to do, procedures may be out of date or the specific situation might never have arisen before. Leadership is essential to empowering staff to use initiative to make their own decisions. The initiative they display can also be described as performance leadership, which brings about the key defining factor for leadership in an organization - Leadership is a top to front-line organizational performance culture.

Management and leadership skills can also be defined as follows:

Management: The skills required to manage people and resources to deliver a product or service.

Leadership: The skills required to engage with people and persuade them to 'buy-in' to a vision or goal.

The two skills are necessarily complementary. Management without leadership will only be effective in a culture of compliance and conformity. Leadership without management can lead to maverick behaviors. Real effectiveness comes only from an appropriate blend of both .

How do you train managers in leadership?

The simple answer is - You can't. Whereas management can be trained as it is a systemic control process with a theoretical base, leadership management training has to occur experientially as it is a reactive cultural performance based on that interactive experience. Talent management programs address this essential experiential need by identifying cross functional task assignments that not only improve the scale of an individual's capability, but also address an individual's leadership scope capability. (Of course, this is a flawed strategy when 'talent' is defined by qualification instead performance as you are merely training your competitor's future managers.) To quote General Colin Powell "Leadership is the ART of accomplishing more than the SCIENCE of management says is possible." As with all "art" forms, techniques can be trained, but the style and motivation to perform must come from within each individual. Leadership development interventions must therefore be structured not only to address technical competency (where performance can be coached), but also to address the alignment of each individual's personal motivation and life vision (discovered through mentoring) with the individual's operational role.

To achieve a true leadership culture and a focus on excellence in the workplace, the myth of the 'natural leader' must be replaced with the reality of people who 'lead naturally' - and the 'naturally' refers not to an innate ability within an individual, but to applying behaviors that are natural to the individual. Natural behaviors cannot be trained, but they can be significantly influenced through initiatives that contain learning situations that develop leadership capabilities by challenging existing behaviors. Great leaders are not great actors. They understand who they are; what they are; have a strong belief in their mission and a genuine concern for the welfare of their staff. Within this definition lies the core strategy of developing leaders. To be effective, leadership development interventions should not be confused with management development interventions, and must be designed to grow individual capability to:

Understand effective leadership behaviors

Understand and evaluate the impact of their pre-existing patterns, beliefs and rules

Understand and define their interpersonal and communication strengths and weaknesses

Understand the critical differences between perception and actuality

Understand the value of team initiative and performance

Understand the motivators and stressors of team members

Leadership interventions are strategic in nature, and focus on the core personal insights required to facilitate the subsequent tactical management skill-set development interventions that enable the transition of the strategies into corporate performances.

Best Practice approach to leadership management training

One of the greatest advantages of identifying and transferring best practice across your workforce is that it can also be a powerful tool for developing a true leadership culture in an organization. Once a performance exception has been identified, the process of best practice transfer can engage both management and front line employees in the input to, and the ownership of an in-house designed training solution.

This collaborative approach to performance improvement, coupled with the subsequent solution implementation introduces measurable performance accountabilities for the whole team, and lays down a performance matrix that can measure bottom line outcomes and individual team performances that identify intervention points for leadership management training and effective employee training programs. Management skill-set skill gaps are easily identified through performance measurement as the best practice being transferred has already been benchmarked, and they can be easily evaluated through 360 degree feedback as being either strategic or tactical failures requiring intervention.

The critical components of this approach to leadership management training are:

the insertion of an in-house training course production capability within the learning and development function

the design, development and implementation of a IT infrastructure capable of benchmarking and measuring performance change

a strategic re-focusing of the role of trainers to skilled coordinators of subject matter experts and systemic human performance technology solution developers

To achieve this strategy, trainers need a fast, simple to use system for defining key performance indicators; producing training courses specifically targeted at performance outcomes, and a measurement system that feeds back performance outcomes to identify course modifications required and identify performance deficiencies requiring leadership management training.

The whole team must be trained simultaneously for leadership management training to be effective. The Best Practice Transfer Ltd. training system has been designed achieve this re-focusing of training capabilities and accountabilities and is simple to use without scripting or programming knowledge, and makes training courses in-house in hours instead of weeks.

We offer comprehensive day-rate short-term and contract long-term point-of-need interim management and leadership development consulting services to support the cultural, behavioral and infrastructure changes related to all leadership performance improvement and leadership management training initiatives.