Building Better Leaders On a Leadership Development Expedition to Cotopaxi, the World's Highest Active Volcano
So you want to build better leaders. That’s a noble undertaking, too bad your likely to fail. Seriously if you follow the well worn path, you’ll fail.
We’ve all been part of the two most popular trends in leadership development trainings:
- Leadership Fantasy Camps (hire big names, sprinkle in some of the CEO’s time and pray that something good comes out of it)
- Team Building Events (make people play embarrassing games, then discuss why their team is dysfunctional and magically assume that talking in a circle will fix everything)
The Leadership Fantasy Camp model usually fails because the presenters tend to give you their opinions, which often contrast with the opinions of the next guy. The audience doesn’t know who to believe and so leave more confused, or even worse mis-informed. They have their fill of cliches, but not skills. I have been a part of many of these events, all very cool, with great food and fabulous bottles of red wine. The most important thing I’ve learned at those events is never be the first presenter on the second morning. A hungover audience is hard to please.
The Team Building Events usually fail because the aging camp counselors delivering them probably never had a real job and never nurtured a team along the time horizons a business does (years not hours or days). I was part of that world for years and while I learned how to facilitate some cool games, it wasn’t until I had dozens of employees and millions of dollars in responsibilities that I fully grasped the challenges facing businesses. The best team building facilitators manipulate your team into making the same old mistakes. Why? Because they know how to facilitate a meaty discussion that addresses that issue.
So how do you create a successful program? You start by looking at the fundamental skills that all great leaders share. What are they?
Learning how to create a mission statement and core values
Mission: A great leader articulates the organization’s mission and fiercely defends that mission. They get everyone in the organization to memorize the mission. They use the mission to motivate at every level so the organization can scale. If you are building new leaders, or making your current leaders better, they have to know how to craft a mission (and yes the accounting dept can have it’s own mission, while the marketing dept has a slightly different one. The trick is that all those missions have to serve the larger organizational mission. The same is true for BOD’s.)
Your first leadership training needs to include a Mission focused approach. Even if your organization has a great mission, your leaders still need to learn how to use the mission as a tool for motivation.
I have been surprised by the lip service that organizations give to mission statements. I know all of us with grey hair suffered through the mission statement craze of the 80s and 90s in which lengthy tomes were created in heated discussions by committees which lacked enthusiasm. That experience turned a lot of us off. We decided that it was more gratifying to just put our heads down and create tactical and strategic successes. Well, as a result our organization’s successes too often depended on external forces (profits rose and fell with the economy or our competitors catching lucky breaks). Just look at how Southwest uses Mission compared to the rest of the airline industry. That company gets it, and profits because of it.
Using our Mission Statement to Navigate
Before we move on to the next installment in this short series, I encourage you to read this blog post about Mission Statements.
