What is Leadership Development? Importance & Practice Method

Leadership development is an important factor in personal as well as organizational growth. A good leader needs to establish a direction and his/her leadership ability to drive the team to achieve the best goals.

This article exploits the core of fostering leadership, exploring essential methods for cultivating leaders who can inspire, guide, and drive positive change. Be ready to unlock new potential, adapt to challenges, and create lasting impact in any environment.

What is Leadership Development?

Leadership development is the process of enhancing an individual’s ability to lead, inspire, and positively impact others within an organization or community. 

To develop leadership skills, you need to constantly practice so that this skill does not fade away. You should build essential skills, such as decision-making, strategic thinking, communication, and emotional intelligence. All of that contributes to a person's effectiveness in guiding teams, managing projects, and driving organizational success. 

The Importance of Leadership Development

The level of leadership is the level of the business. If a business lacks a capable leader, it is like a boat going out to sea without a captain. Leadership development guides the business. A capable leader will have a clear strategy and vision. Determine the destination of the team and how to get there.

Exploring and developing talented personnel

A visionary leader must see the potential of employees and invest in their development so that they can become key personnel for the business. Administrators need to create an open learning environment as well as motivate employees to break the limits and make breakthroughs in their work.

Building a positive business environment

The working environment will reflect the leadership style as well as the ability of the leader. A person with sharp leadership capacity is the root of a healthy, learning, and constructive working environment. At the same time, they will also see the gaps in their team to fix them promptly

Bring the team to success

Good leaders have a long-term and comprehensive vision. From there, they set clear goals and directions for the entire business. Tasks are tightly organized and divided according to capacity. More importantly, a capable leader will know how to make all employees look at a common goal and pursue it together.

Effective Leadership Development Methods

Leadership developments do not develop naturally but require intentional, long-term efforts to form and hone them. Here are 6 ways to help you achieve leadership development.

Practice self-discipline

Brent Gleeson is the founder and CEO of Take Point Leadership - a consulting firm focused on leadership and organizational development, cultural transformation, and building high-performance teams. According to Gleeson, research shows that self-disciplined people are happier. Because with discipline and self-control, we actually accomplish more goals that we truly care about. Self-discipline is the bridge between set goals and accomplished goals.

Take Point Leadership CEO shares 8 steps to help you practice self-discipline:

Step 1: Know your strengths and weaknesses

Self-awareness is a powerful tool for expanding your comfort zone, but it requires constant focus and acknowledging your shortcomings, whatever they may be. You need to know your strengths, but more importantly, know how to overcome your shortcomings. It will be difficult to ensure discipline without overcoming your weaknesses.

Step 2: Remove temptations

Simply removing the biggest temptations from your environment will significantly improve your self-discipline. For example, if you want to complete your work with the best performance, you should stay away from social media notifications. The more you reduce the noise around your working environment, the more you will be able to optimize work performance efficiency.

Step 3: Set clear goals and have a plan 

You must understand clearly what success with a specific job will mean to you. After all, if you don't know where you are going, you will easily get lost or deviate. A clear plan with each step and deadline is what you need to do before taking action. Taking action with a plan does not necessarily help you succeed, but taking action without a plan will in most cases only lead to failure.

Step 4: Practice daily discipline 

You are not born with discipline, so you need to practice discipline every day. Discipline must be formed and maintained as a habit. For example, if you want to maintain the discipline of exercising for at least 30 minutes a day, you should start exercising according to the plan instead of procrastinating for too many reasons.

Step 5: Break down the goal

Being disciplined with a big, challenging, and difficult goal is not easy. You will feel out of breath, even discouraged and scared. To avoid this, you can break down your goals to be disciplined within the resources you can ensure to maintain. 

For example, maintaining the discipline of running at least 200km per month is challenging. Instead of setting a total km goal like that, you can break down your goals by week. Controlling and disciplining by week will be easier than by month.

Step 6: Change your perception of willpower

When you have a mindset of unlimited willpower, you will continue to develop and achieve more in work and life. Limits often only exist in your mind. Instead of saying I can only..., you can think differently that I will try...

Step 7: Have a backup plan 

Psychologists use a technique to boost willpower called "implementation intention". To practice self-discipline, add a backup plan to your action plan. When things don’t go as planned, you have a backup plan in place. You don’t have to make a sudden decision when your emotions and mind are in turmoil.

Step 8: Find a trusted coach or advisor 

Coaches and advisors can give you useful advice on your work. It will be valuable for you to optimize your work and avoid going in circles.

Brent Gleeson also points out that even when you practice self-discipline, you need to learn to forgive yourself and move forward. If you stumble, find the cause and continue to act. You should not let yourself be wrapped up in feelings of guilt, anger, or disappointment because these emotions will only drag you down deeper and hinder future progress.

Be willing to take responsibility

Imagine a day when you feel happy. Surely, it is not a day when you just lie in one place and do nothing. A happy day for many people will be the day when they do the work they love, feel meaningful, take responsibility, and complete it on time.

Taking responsibility is not vague but often expressed through aspects such as:

First, you need to take responsibility for the success of your own career. You must be good at your profession, capable of solving problems and your work.

Second, you need to set high, challenging goals and then work hard to achieve them.

Third, you need to face the challenges encounter to continue to act and even learn from failure.

Empower your employees

Leaders who micromanage each task will only get caught up in the endless mess of work every day. Instead, empower your employees through effective delegation and assignment.

For tasks that are not too important but need to be handled urgently, you can delegate to employees. When delegating, you need to clarify the following factors with employees:

• What needs to be done

• What results need to be achieved

• Completion time

• Who can coordinate with which department to handle

When delegating work to employees, you need to motivate them, show them the value of the work being done, if necessary.

Leaders need to based on the reality of the work delegate to the right person at the right time. For example, tasks that require good communication and team connection will need an extroverted person to handle. On the contrary, tasks that require meticulousness and caution will be handled better by an introverted employee. When you delegate to the right person, and the employee is ready for the job, the delegated task can be achieved as expected.

During the implementation process, you also need to monitor and supervise the implementation according to the appropriate cycle. For example, for tasks that need to be handled within 1 month, you can check in the work 1-1 with the employee every Friday. As for urgent tasks that need to be handled during the week, you can check in every 2-3 days or even every day.

When employees complete their assigned tasks, you should not forget to evaluate, learn from experience to find ways to optimize the work, and acknowledge the employees' work efforts.

Effective delegation will help leaders reduce the workload. On the other hand, employees will gradually mature and accumulate more experience and practical knowledge through the implementation of delegated tasks.

Develop situational awareness

Situational awareness is a concept often used in the fields of aviation, medicine, military. When you have situational awareness, you will be able to quickly grasp, detect, and find ways to control the environmental developments that affect your team.

For example, in the aviation industry, the pilot's environment is the cockpit, the weather conditions as well as the air traffic controllers. In the business world, the project manager's environment is team project implementation, stakeholders both inside and outside the organization, project progress as well as product quality, etc. These are all factors that can affect the achievement of project goals.

Endsley's (1988) research has shown that at the most basic level, situational awareness is knowing what is going on in the environment with its implications for the present and the future. While this may sound simple in a stable, straightforward situation, it can become a real challenge in a fast-paced, complex environment.

Endsley in a study published in 1995 said: situational awareness has 3 levels of development from low to high as follows:

• Level 1: Awareness

• Level 2: Understanding

• Level 3: Prediction

Situational awareness is a concept that is particularly suitable for situations characterized by high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA).

Leaders who develop situational awareness skills will achieve many diverse benefits such as:

• Increasing work performance

• Quickly grasping changing situations to make timely adjustments

• Preventing risky situations, errors, safety impacts, and planning disruptions

• Helping the team achieve goals in the most effective ways

To improve situational awareness skills, you can refer to some of the following ways of implementation:

• Communicating and exchanging information reasonably with the team or stakeholders

• Planning and managing the implementation progress closely

• Prevent and anticipate situations that may arise in the short, medium, and long term

• Collect the organization's management knowledge. Errors, problems, and unexpected occurrences will need to be recorded to prevent recurrence.

Inspire others

Basically, most of your employees want to make positive contributions to the organization instead of working without motivation. When employees do not work well, the problem often lies not with the employees but with the organization and management.

If the leader establishes an organizational structure, assigns clear tasks, and knows how to inspire his team, the employees will gradually improve their efficiency and work performance. Inspiring employees is a skill, even an art that leaders need to master. You can refer to the notes on building and inspiring employees below:

• The leader himself must be a role model at work, inspiring employees

• Identifying the signs and causes of employee boredom is always necessary

• You should listen to the opinions of employees through office-wide discussions or 1-1 interviews

• Inspire and motivate employees not only with salary or bonuses but also with corporate culture

• Maintain recognition, evaluation, and honor employees according to the continuous performance management (CPM) method

• Leaders should accompany employees as supporters instead of just giving orders indifferently

• Set challenging goals with employees, inspire them according to the OKRs goal management method

• Communicate proactively, positively, and empathize with employees like a teammate in a football team

Continuously learn and develop

Leadership of a company or organization is just a job position. When you are a leader, you still need to continuously learn and develop your skills. In the development of a business or market, a leader who does not continue to learn will inevitably fall behind, regress, or only handle work with limited empiricism.

Continuous learning for a leader does not necessarily mean going to formal school, but can also be learned through many different forms such as:

• Participating in workshops and professional seminars

• Directly contributing to challenging, difficult projects with the team

• Learning new skills to support work

• Learning about technology trends or industry trends

Leaders have a great influence on organizational culture or the action choices of members. When the leader himself is an example of learning, the employees below will also improve their learning spirit.

Conclusion

Leadership Development is a process of accumulation, sedimentation, and requires a lot of effort from each individual. Not only do leaders need leadership skills, but employees also need these skills. Leadership and mastery of one's work to continuously optimize work performance are essential for every member of the organization, regardless of job position or level.

To develop leadership skills in the right direction and effectively from the beginning, you can refer to Skilltrans's course.