Developing Leadership Skills Invest Now (or Pay Later)

Most association leaders give good lip service to the need for leadership development but argue that heavy workloads and inadequate time and money make such efforts difficult. Donal O'Hare, former head of management development for The World Bank, isn't buying it.

By Kristin Merriman-Clarke, CAE

Ask people when the last time leadership development was a separate agenda item at their associations' strategic or operational planning session, and you are likely to get more than a few embarrassed, sometimes even defensive, responses: "Um, I don't think it ever was."

Ask whether leadership development is critical to the success of strategic and operational plans, and you'll generally hear a hearty round of affirmatives. Query these professionals about the wisdom of having a written leadership development strategy, and you've launched a conversation that needs to occur in every association: How do you take a big-picture, rather than a departmental or individual, look at the skills and knowledge needs of current staff and match those needs with the abilities and know-how necessary to move the organization forward?

"One of the problems here is that institutions don't regard their top team and their top executives as a strategic asset," says Donal O'Hare, president of the consulting firm O'Hare Associates and former head of management development at The World Bank. "Given the importance of the people dimension, your top team should be regarded as a strategic advantage that your institution has vis-a-vis the others. If you think in those terms, then [leadership development] would get on the agenda. You would invest in it, and when there's a downturn in the economy, the development of people wouldn't be the first thing you'd chop, because you'd realize that, more than ever, you're going to need people who are innovative, creative, and adaptable and who can help lead you where you need to go."

Many of those people likely are sitting around the table at your staff meetings — but not if they are unrecognized or inadequately trained as the potential leaders they are. According to O'Hare, common mistakes of next-generation leaders include arrogance, ignorance of business management, insensitivity toward other people, and poor team-building skills.

These problems and other desired skills can be addressed through solid training — not necessarily training in the traditional sense of a two-hour classroom session focused on a do-this-don't-do-that list about a single skill. Theory is out. Personalized, hands-on experiences, role-playing, and mentoring are in.
Part of that evolution is because of growing recognition regarding the importance of so-called "micro-skills," which can be harder to learn from books and PowerPoint presentations. O'Hare gives the example of personal relations as a general skill area, "but within that, there is the skill of verbalizing and understanding another person's message, knowing how and when to probe and question the other person, and in doing so, knowing when I should be probing and questioning from the perspective of my own agenda or probing from the perspective of whom I'm communicating with.

"I believe these... all are critically important skills any manager or leader should have," he continues. "When it comes to the business arena or conveying a strategy, while the domain of that discussion is a strategic one, we're bringing those micro-skills into play to help us address the strategic issues in a meaningful way."

In addition to good micro-skills, up-and-comers — as well as already-on-top professionals — need to become proficient at some of the newer, larger leadership skills. One such skill is what O'Hare has termed "strategic navigation," the need for rapid adaptability and smart response to constant external changes. "...We tend to think of strategic planning and then moving to an operational plan," O'Hare explains. "...[but] the outside environment is changing at such a rate that ... there's much more day-to-day strategic navigation involved than there was in previous years, when our environment was much more stable. This has serious implications for the strategic capability of our leaders at all levels."

Defining Must-Have Leadership ExperiencesSo what are some of the most effective ways to develop a more strategic mindset on staff, along with a greater abundance of micro-skills on the individual level? One step is for managers to consciously provide a variety of work experiences customized for each individual's leadership development — and that doesn't mean simply requiring excellence in the accomplishment of established job duties.

Off the top of his head, O'Hare lists five recommended leadership development experiences that managers should provide for their staff.

Place subordinates in challenging situations where there are different, strongly held points of view. They will have to play a catalytic role in bringing the parties together to generate something more than any one of them could on their own.
Ensure they have the opportunity to work with one or two people who have brilliant technical ability and the potential to develop, but where the level of maturity is turning others off, perhaps because of arrogance, overambitiousness, or overmanagement due to failure to delegate.
Force them to tackle some different issues in bringing on people, in developing people from lower levels.

Provide an experience in which they must bring about cooperation with external organizations in difficult, tense circumstances.

Expose them to the strategic thinking of others and ask them to be a driving force in a strategy reformulation or some other element of organizational transformation. This might mean deputizing the individual to become a point person in putting it all together for the senior manager, while the subordinate simultaneously benefits from advice and guidance they receive during the process.

The last item, in particular, was exactly what Kristi Graves' supervisor did — and to great effect. Graves, manager of special initiatives for the American Institute of Architects (AIA), calls herself "very fortunate to work for someone who values leadership development and makes it a point to work with her staff to grow those skills." Graves recalls one experience in particular: a major AIA initiative called "A National Conversation."

"AIA wanted to create conversations at the local level that were spurred by a video it had created about issues facing the profession," she explains. "The videos went out to our local components, which showed them at local meetings and asked members to respond with their thoughts. The response of the components was to send those comments on to national [headquarters], where we analyzed them and put them into a report. Had it not been for the skills I've developed, maybe I would not have been involved in that, because it took the ability to bring a variety of people together from different departments.
"Working together on a project like that was a great opportunity for me. I wasn't in charge, but I was responsible for the final report," she continues. "... As I improve my skills, the opportunities grow for me to get involved with more projects within the association, like broader initiatives rather than individual projects."

Graves also remembers witnessing the type of catalytic, producing-for-the-greater-good experience O'Hare recommends for next-generation leaders. "I learned that it's very important to solicit input from a broad number of people when initiating a new project," she notes. "A good example from my last association was when I was working on its Web site, and we were about to relaunch. We held small-group meetings with different departments, but we weren't getting very much feedback.

"Then we had a meeting with two people working on continuing education, and a manager came in with an administrative person who was relatively new. [The new woman] came in with a page of suggestions for how we could improve the site as it pertained to their department. It was something I never forgot about this person, because it showed a lot of initiative — and today she is sitting next to me as a project manager. You just never know who is going to come up with something valuable."

Integrating Leadership Development
Such stories are encouraging but, unfortunately, not abundant. "The whole tendency these days, particularly in matrix organizations, is to build in numerous checks and balances," O'Hare says. "But obviously, if we take the intensity of our processes too far, it's like other things — strengths can become weaknesses.... The result can be that we bring about a conformity and homogeneity in the way we expect people to behave. That environment makes it much more difficult for leaders to break out and establish themselves."
He points to research exploring whether managers and leaders were different. The study indicated that "sometimes people face a challenge in their organization, and they have to decide if they're going to go with the flow or whether, in fact, they're going to go within themselves, become more independent, and strike out in a bold, new way to try to invoke a response in others to follow them," O'Hare says.

"But in many cases, the organizational environment we're creating is not one particularly conducive to the creation of leaders," he continues. "We're reinforcing wonderful collaboration and lots of other good things through networking and trying to get the best ideas from all sources, but a good question is, 'How well are we doing in creating an environment in which leaders can thrive?'"

He urges associations to look at themselves as a business in terms of delineating strategic direction and converting those strategies into a sound operational plan. The hitch is the next step, the one many associations forget.
"Then they need to look at the institution as an organization and make sure it has all the elements it needs, such as structure, systems, people, culture, leadership, and management — and that all those elements are in alignment," O'Hare notes. "In my experience many organizations fail to realize that when you tweak or change things on the strategic side, before you go to implementation, you need to make sure the organization is capable of delivering what it's come up with strategically."

He warns that he often sees organizations attempt to do something, despite having the wrong structure and disregarding the leadership implications. "They don't make the connection," he cautions. "And there's often a lag time between making the strategic change and adapting the organization to equip it to carry this strategy into effect.... They rarely get to the point where they say, 'This strategic change is actually going to call for a completely different set of skills than we're currently requiring, and therefore we need to invest and do some fast-track development of key people.' ... The development of leaders is most often short-changed." (See sidebar, "Elements of a Leadership Development Strategy.")

Ben Martin, member relations manager at the Health Industry Distributors Association, agrees. He says leadership training for "real-life" situations "has not been a focus or widely available" and credits much of his own development to informal mentoring by his boss. Although he lauds certain leadership development conferences and volunteers with professional organizations to gain more leadership experience, Martin has yet to participate in any of the role-playing exercises or significant online training and follow-up that have been shown to be effective.

He blames inadequate leadership development in general on the current financial state of most associations. "That kind of investment not only requires a lot of time but also a good deal of financing," Martin says. "… Not only that, but we're always looking to get business done, and we don't take much time to close the loop on objectives like leadership training. It takes a lot of discipline to weigh the long-term results and benefits against the short-term pain or expense or time out of the office. It requires a great deal of foresight."
O'Hare agrees that foresight is important but has less patience with the usual no-money excuse. "We're going to be facing a future without knowing much about what it's going to look like. You need to have people who are adaptable, creative, and who are very strong in the way they work with each other. … [Next-generation leaders] are expecting their employers to take a much more proactive role in their development. If that isn't happening, and they find their peers in other associations are benefiting that way, they'll start to consider other prospects."

Executive Update continues its leadership development discussion this month in the Electronic Edition.

Developing Tomorrow's Leaders
In addition, mid-level association leaders who want to learn more from O'Hare and their peers are invited to attend an interactive "Leadership Development for the Next Generation" program designed for individual reflection, role-playing, group learning, and action planning. The Center for Association Leadership event will be May 18 - 20 in Farmington, Pennsylvania, at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort & Spa, which is sponsoring the program. For more information contact (202) 326-9550 or visit www.centeronline.org.

Author Link: Kristin Merriman-Clarke, CAE, is an associate and Web editor at Executive Update. She can be reached at (202) 326-9548.
E-mail: kclarke@gwsae.org

Related Articles:Elements of a Leadership Development Strategy
Elements of a Leadership Development Strategy

Donal O'Hare, who has worked for organizations in 28 countries, says a clear leadership development strategy is essential to organizational success anywhere in the world. Here's how to get started if you don't have a formal process in place yet.

Examine the organization's strategic direction and ask yourself, "What are the implications of this for structure, systems, and people, including leadership."
In looking at the leadership implications, be clear about what sorts of competencies and experiences are needed.

Assess the association's staff and volunteer leaders to identify gaps and determine short-, medium-, and long-term approaches for closing them.

Use mentoring as a strategic tool. Consider the example O'Hare cites regarding some Japanese companies he has worked with. The higher up a person is within the management hierarchy, the more of the individual's year was spent mentoring managers at lower levels — and the senior leaders are held accountable for the performance of those they mentor.

Determine if you can create specific experiences for people to help them grow in certain ways. Are there particular exposures you can give them externally that would help? Are there opportunities for them to become aware of their strengths and weaknesses and to receive constructive advice about how to improve performance?

Engage in a lot of coaching, mentoring, and focusing on long-term leadership development because, as O'Hare says, such efforts should be viewed as being "a corporate resources insurance policy."

Constantly evaluate the leadership pipeline in your organization to identify and diminish barriers that can impede strategic and operational processes.