Professional Development Trends
This week I thought I would share a summary of a conversation with a client, with his permission, outlining the thought-processes behind choosing the right partner to improve his own performance, performance of the enterprise, productivity and develop managers and key employees in the enterprise.
The dialogue went something like this:
As you face increasing pressure to deliver results in the short-term and create exciting, sustainable futures for the long-term, all the while developing leaders within your organisation, you will require advisors, facilitators and outside-aid to propose and then implement activity to help with ranges of complex issues.
You know there is a vast transfer of institutional, industrial and professional knowledge demanded by current market-environments. You need to augment gaps in knowledge and skills, emphasising the transfer of wisdom. Leadership competencies, management capabilities and functional skills all need improving. You will also need to create greater agility, consistent attitudes and behaviours as well as improve communication through the enterprise.
Your future forecast is to need managers with much more meaningful interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence where exceptional leadership competencies, attitudes and behaviours are demanded. Since you are placing a premium on these elements, it is very likely you will demand even more focus on developing yourself as well as individuals to lead your enterprises, divisions, departments and teams.
Exploring outside aid will mean you will need to define whether you are looking for consultants, facilitators, trainers or coaches. When looking at coaches, you will need to define whether they are life coaches, career coaches, executive coaches or business coaches and whether you believe they need, or have had, business and/or executive experience.
Consulting, facilitating, coaching and training is certainly becoming an even greater necessary-focus for you to propel your people, your organisation and yourself further and faster; gaining a multiplier effect for long-term results, not just satisfying the need for this year’s closing numbers.
You will choose outside help which offers useful-learning in a format that is memorable and fun; why make it dull and boring which is easily forgotten.
Breakthrough thinking and new information will be driven by knowledge, experience and skills you and your management team need in order to achieve new patterns of action; more than advice, more than consulting, more than training and more than life-coaching, you are going to demand implementation as well as advice and intervention.
Given this brief, you will want to find those who have been line managers, directors and operatives in enterprises and can show they have been serial-achievers. You will search for a unique blend of senior executive experience, professional coaching presence, and a gift for leveraging diverse strengths to accelerate leader-development, management-capabilities and team-alignment with professional intervention-effectiveness.
The demand for ‘been there, seen that, done that’ will continue to rise, as you are better positioned to help your leaders. You will be looking for pithy insights and proven strategies but also recognise each situation is unique; off-the shelf proposals will not fit your particular situation.
There will be a need for mutually accountable relationships. You will seek outside help from people who are prepared to customise and tailor-make interventions to share practical wisdom relevant to you and your situation, which can be implemented speedily; quickly weaponising against the most pressing concerns.
You will ensure you find hard-working outside help where aid with implementation is part of delivery; look for individuals who are prepared to roll-up their sleeves and get involved. Does your possible facilitator suggest pre- and post-360 interviews, structured feedback and other tools which will be used to quantify and qualify results, demonstrating measurable results and return-on-investment?