1.1

1.1 Introduction

What is leadership?

Leadership is the skill of getting a group of individuals to be organized to attain a common objective or goal. There has been a shift on how people conceive leaders and leadership in the past few years. As a result, new approaches to leadership development practices have emerged to equip individuals with required skills. More and more organizations need interactive leaders that can organize resources effectively and maintain good workplace relationships. This has necessitated the development of approaches that can offer the best Human resources when it comes to leadership.

Nowadays, there are many issues forcing organizations and companies of all sizes to seek all ways of establishing and maintaining the readiness and stability of their employees. Some of these issues include dizzying economic situations, changing population characteristics, brain draining and a drive to improve the levels of employee retention. If there is any organization that has not yet embarked on a leadership development program, it will likely do so in the near future.

There are important situations that make it necessary for employees to boost their leadership skills. When an employee is transferred from a department where he or she has expertise to another unit where he/she lacks the needed expertise, the individual will be forced to improve on that area.

2.1 Key themes essential in best practice leadership development programs

The following are key themes that are essential for the best practice leadership development programs:

The program should be well customized and tailored to meet the demands and needs of the organization in question.The program should consist of a series of experiential workshops rather than a single block course. This is to allow the learner to transfer learning into the workplace much more effectively.The leadership development and training programme should action learning projects so that participants are able to apply the learning they have acquired in real life situation within their workplace.The participants should be provided with coaching in between the experiential workshops to make the learning more effective.The top officials and management should be involved in the programme to give it the validity it requires. They can set expectations, listen to presentations or even coach the participants.The program must include a 360 degree feedback or behavior profiling to offer feedback on the performance and the behavior style of the participant.Enabled E- learning to ensure online interaction of the resources and contentsLeadership consultancy to enable people in responsible positions in the organization to acquire the needed skills in the workplace.Role playing and simulations to design suitable and customized leadership development programs.Exchange of the leadership roles and making notes on observations.

These leadership development initiatives are very important undertakings. They target managers of all levels, emerging leaders and executives. For any human resource manager of a large or a medium-sized organization, the following practices will work best for his workplace culture and objectives. These are the best practices which have been proven and can be used on his way to success.

2.2 Customized leadership development program

The importance of tailoring the structure and content of the programme

The components of any leadership development programme should be customized to satisfy the needs and objectives of the business. It should not be just a public course.

It is more important to analyze the business strategies by a team of experts. This team should consist of individuals who know the organization inside out. They should identify the needs of the organization and factors that will help to place the organization in a better position. They should identify its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and any threats in the market. After this

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 03.09.2013
ISBN: 978-3-7309-4729-6

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