Leadership Development Rebounding Fast

Leadership is taking center stage as a topic in organizations as many seek leaders and seek to grow their employees into leaders. In the economic turmoil of the past couple of years, leadership took second place to skills such as cost savings, employee layoffs, performance improvement, and doing more with less.

Just as employee retention is emerging as an issue, leadership success is currently emerging as an issue in organizations. Let's start with several leadership tips, my clients have found helpful over the years.

Your leadership style is situational. Your leadership style depends on the task, the team or individual's capabilities and knowledge, the time and tools available and the results desired. Here is the tell, sell, consult, join and delegate leadership style model that many of my groups have found useful. The situation dictates your leadership style.

AmyK Hutchens of AmyK International, Inc., says, "Leaders are suffering from their own business hangover. During our recent political in-fighting and economic uncertainty, businesses have had their nose to the grindstone striving to do more with less. Everyone was so focused on surviving and cutting, they're just now looking up and realizing they have no clear next steps, limited vision and no energy."

"As a result, 70 percent or more of organizations are now coming to us asking for leadership training over sales and other more tactical topics - the focus has flip flopped - and even for those that are coming to us for sales, we're discovering leadership and communication challenges at the root of their business development issues."

AmyK offers these three quick and easy tips for executive development that any business leader can practice to immediately improve his/her leadership performance.

• "Focus on energy, not time. Time is a constant; energy is a manageable, renewable resource. What's sucking out your energy and what refuels it? Your answers will influence your strategy for energy management within the constraints of time.


• "Leadership happens one conversation at a time. Slow down and ask better questions. Focus on thought-provoking questions over reports. In meetings prep, devote at least five minutes to think of three to five questions that will lead to a more productive, more thought-provoking meeting. These five minutes will save you hours down the road.


• "Create internal alignment. Step back and ask yourself: What am I resisting? What am I judging? What am I attached to? Answer these three questions and you'll gain clarity, insight and a foundation for momentum."

Effective leadership skills and practices warrant development time and energy. Use these resources to further develop your leader within and your leadership skills organizationally.

_{Image Copyright Janos Gehring}