A Leadership Skill Development Guide

Being successful at leadership skill development means understanding: a.The major TYPES OF SKILLS to develop, and b. HOW TO DEVELOP those skills. It means learning a process for turning practical knowledge into mastered skills.

I remember the words my mother ground deeply into my mind starting when I was a little boy. Perhaps your mother had similar words. She told me on many occasions, “Work hard and you’ll succeed.” It was as if endless hours of 20/7 days automatically correlated to vast wealth.

After putting these words into practice for many years, it seems she was only half right. Really she should have said is, “Work hard and you’ll succeed; work smart and you don’t have to work so hard.” And to work smarter, you must continually upgrade your knowledge and skills.

The model stresses that effective skill development requires learning how to master a process of developing skills. To do that, one needs the right mixture of feedback, motivation, practice and theory.

Our greatest adversary is our own ignorance.

Murray Johannsen.

Skill Development Phase 1: Find Sound Theory

Leadership skill development is only as good as the theory behind it. In other words, before you practice, you must know and understand intellectually what has to be done. Good theory is relevant, practical, detailed and convertible into a behavior.

If you don't practice, you can fall down, but you can't ski.

M. Johannsen

Skill Development Phase 2: Practice

Some leadership skill development efforts require a few minutes; others take hundreds of hours. In the hundreds of hours category, we have becoming a persuasive speaker. Even those with great aptitude blessed with a large dose of talent must practice endlessly to get really good.

On the other hand, skill development on how to make a positive first impression takes takes less than 30 minutes since the theory is not that complicated. However, one must still practice a many times to get good at it.

"Skill is nil without will."

Judah ibn Tibbon, c. 1120-c.1190 Spanish physician and translator
A Father's Admonition to His Son

Practice Requires Motivation

Standard assessments are very good at measuring some things, but they can't measure motivation. In our model, a person serious about leadership skill development must be internally motivated to perfect the skill. It is unrealistic to expect any teacher or coach to motivate the apathetic or the lazy to perfect developing a skill. Still, smart organizations are wise to have defined consequences for desired and undesired behaviors.

Practice Requires Feedback

Skill development requires feedback. Unfortunately, behavioral feedback is commonly not done in most programs. There are two ways to get feedback: do it yourself or get others to do it for you. In our programs, we typically provide skilled coaches who can provide positive and negative feedback.

Skill Development Phase 3: Skill Mastery

This is our term for perfection—to "be all that you can be." This is a special state of mind when leadership skill development in largely over and the skill runs largely in the unconscious.

You You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.

Wayne Gretzky

Leadership skill development is a big business. According to Training Magazine's October 2004 issue, 6.5 billion USD will be spent on the training of executives in 2004. Asia forms a part of the global executive education market that Business Week estimated to be worth US $662 million.

Great IT Leaders Have to be Made

There seems to be the perception that, "As long as tech organizations are profitable, there is no imperative to focus on leadership development." This, however, is a very short-term view.

Training directors, human resource managers, and the organization's executives all play important roles in human resource development. In fact, skills development has become an important priority for human resource managers. Two recent human resource surveys in the United States illustrate this:

HR.com presented a survey in October of 2004 that listed the top 25 skills development issues of human resource managers. Leadership development came in second, just behind performance management.

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