Your leadership team spends considerable time developing strategy. A substantial portion of that work is creating the vision, mission and values that will delight the customer and motivate the workforce. Often strategy formulation will include an audacious goal that will change the business in the appropriate ways to make it viable in the future. And, this work is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what must come next to drive the organization forward.
Is your management team up to the challenge? What obstacles will they face? Consider difficulties like:
Organizations invest in leadership training to address many of these concerns. That’s because the format of a leadership program combines classroom training, practice, and feedback loops to boost critical skills such as decision making, strategic planning, portfolio planning, ideation, teamwork, and effective networking.
The networking perspective is important. In the Harvard Business Review Article “How Leaders Create and Use Networks,” Herminia Ibarra and Mark Hunter describe how effective leaders learn to employ three kinds of networks for growth and support purposes:
The strategic network is the one that provides the relationships and information sources to hone ideas and build coalitions of support, and this is the most difficult for people to build. Many leaders need help to properly transition their skill set from being functionally oriented to being politically savvy and able to build and leverage stakeholder support from within and outside the organization.
Leadership skills are not just meant for the senior team. Projects are the means for driving change in an organization. Project managers and sponsors must be excellent communicators, influencers and change agents. They are responsible for maintaining the vision of success and must convince a team to adopt this vision over their own interests. Project managers and sponsors use their leadership skills to keep their projects in sync with organizational priorities, build coalitions of support for the project, and create high-performing teams.
Business relationship management (BRM) is a particular field of study under the leadership training umbrella that will help your organization deliver on its value proposition. The Business Relationship Body of Knowledge includes competencies like:
The business relationship managers within an organization help to ensure strategy execution and organizational capability.
Building leadership competencies through effective leadership or BRM training programs is the kind of investment every organization with a compelling mission, and need for operational excellence, should strongly consider.