I apologize in advance to all of my colleagues and friends who are HR Business Partners. This blog is a
non-traditional perspective about what Advantexe thinks are the practical things organizations and leaders who care about development should be doing in order to acquire, develop, and retain the Emerging Leaders who are the future of your business.
Each one of my four points may seem contrarian to what you have been taught to expect in terms of leadership development and management best practices but are based on research and 25+ years of observing Emerging Leaders in action.
Keep things focused and specific and manage the range of flexibility they have
Conventional wisdom will have you believe that one of the best things you can do in terms of developing Emerging Leaders is to give them a lot of flexibility so they will feel empowered and engaged. The problem is that too many Emerging Leaders won’t know what to do with the flexibility. They haven’t been exposed to, or brought up in, environments where thinking and behaving in business are important. I am thinking about simple tasks such as the basic business discipline of creating a project plan or even a task list to manage priorities and actions.
Tell them you have high expectations and expect top performance
In a world where everyone gets a trophy for just showing up, too many of our Emerging Leaders think that just getting by is good performance. Tell them specifically you have high expectations (and what they are) and that you expect top performance. An Emerging Leader is someone who might one day be a leader of businesses, so setting high expectations and teaching them to be accountable for achievement of goals is something very important.
Expose them to the big picture while holding them accountable for specifics
I bet one of the reasons they are deemed as an Emerging Leader is that once they figure out what to do and are told how to do it, they will work very hard to achieve tasks. While I mentioned previously that too much flexibility is not the best thing, too much micro-management is also not a good thing. The secret to successfully developing Emerging Leaders is providing a perspective on the big picture – such as understanding the complete system of business – at the same time you are holding them accountable for the specifics. It is a challenge, but it is also how it works.
Don’t stretch them; let them excel at what they are good at
Another conventional wisdom of leadership development is finding stretch opportunities for Emerging Leaders. A “stretch opportunity” is a project or job that pushes someone out of their comfort zone in order to learn new ways of doing things. But that process is usually pretty messy, impacts real-world performance, and can emotionally scar an Emerging Leader. Our suggestion is utilizing tools like Business Simulations to stretch and train them while they develop their own skills at the things they are good at?
