As each year comes to a close, it’s good to reflect on new skills, goals, and successes from the past year as you plan for the future. To help you, we compiled a list of our top learning and development posts of 2019. Because you might have missed them at the time, but we don't want you to miss out on these insights!
We hope you will find inspiration and valuable action items in these posts as you continue in your leadership development journey.
Each year FlashPoint explores upcoming leadership development trends and research to understand how we can better develop leaders. Our 2019 research showed important themes around how designing, developing, and delivering leadership programs that lead to optimal results and a steady and ready pipeline of leaders is evolving.
Gallup has studied employee engagement and its impact for years. In 2018, a study of 7,500 full-time employees found that 23% of employees felt burned out “very often or always” while 44% felt burned out “sometimes”. It’s clear that since nearly two-thirds of full-time workers experience burnout at least sometimes, we’re facing an epidemic of burned out employees. Leadership can begin to remedy many of the root causes of burnout.
With a new year comes new roles and new responsibilities. Our newly appointed managers are likely going to face a few hurdles and will need our support along the way in order to help them reach their full potential.
Understanding the difference between leadership and management allows us to choose the right approach for any given situation. In order to get the best outcomes, it’s important to intentionally practice both leadership and management skills – and make sure you are using them in the right context.
Why? Good, even great teamwork is a valued commodity, but it doesn’t happen naturally and without hard work. Especially in the “new normal” – decentralized, flatter organizations – teams may have the benefit of greater collaboration but may also be pulled in multiple directions. The key to success? Build and maintain high-performing teams.
Leadership development participants need a support system up, down, and around them to make development really stick – and the manager is a key component of this network. Participants’ managers don’t always understand their role or know how they can support the development process. But we can change that by formally incorporating touchpoints for participants and managers to have coaching conversations about the leadership development program and the participant’s takeaways.
Choosing an assessment to pair with your leadership development program is a big choice. You want to ensure that your leaders are engaged in the process and are not only willing to take the first step on their leadership journey, but that the right tools are placed in their hands to assist them along the way. Which assessment is the best tool for your team? Is a self-assessment the right stepping stone, or is 360 feedback the next step your leaders need to take?
A study by Brandon Hall Group shows that coaching is highly effective-even surpassing classroom training’s effectiveness for leader development (2016-2017). If you're not using it yet (or not using it widely), it's time to start and that begins by being able to show results!
In any relationship, communication is key. It helps to address concerns, clarify questions, and convey emotions. Good workplace communication creates a comfortable and effective environment. Without clear information exchange, team members can become disgruntled and project completion can be left in jeopardy.
Any leader can improve their leadership capabilities, but it takes dedicated effort and one critical quality: being receptive to feedback. We often say feedback is a gift because it provides self-awareness and a direction in which to focus. The best leaders know that and respect asking for and receiving feedback accordingly.