Leadership Development For A Growing Culture

by Jonathan Jones

Good employees are the most important asset to an organization and demand strong leadership. Strong leaders achieve desired results and develop people at the same time. To create consistent growth, standard processes are developed to establish consistency and accountability. All of these are elements of an organization’s culture. Ultimately, this culture of discipline and growth develops a stronger environment where employees believe in each other and establish trust.

As a company starts to grow, the capacity for the leader to manage and lead people gets stretched and most find it’s time to delegate leadership to additional levels of management. One trap many leaders fall into is assuming their best performers are ideal new mangers. They simply carve off a section of their team and install the performer as the leader, assuming they will lead as well as they had performed in their previous position.

New leaders, especially great individual performers, tend to go in one of the following directions:
- Assume all their key members will automatically follow them with no coaching or interaction because they are a great performer.
- Micromanage people to be like themselves.

These “newbie” leadership mistakes cause employees to despise the new manager or the manager discovers they prefer performing and despises managing. Nobody is happy.

Just like the processes put in place to establish consistency and accountability for performance, leadership development needs to be an essential element of a culture. There are many landmines companies can hit without a clear plan and definitive expectations for leadership development, including performance and legal issues. An untrained leader without a clear guide to lead properly can destroy a growing culture.

To grow a strong culture, the organization must develop strong leaders.

Jonathan Jones (Jonathan.jones@vistagechair.com or 314-608-0783) is a CEO peer group chair/coach for Vistage International.