Five Challenges that accelerate leadership development

The high levels of change demand increased leadership capabilities and the requires organisation to focus on the development of future leaders. The Center for Creative Leadership has studies the development of leadership for the last 38 years and have identified five key challenges that have facilitate the effective development of leadership:

• Challenge 1: Unfamiliar responsibilities. When you practice new skills and expand your knowledge base, you learn how to operate effectively when you are early in a learning curve.
• Challenge 2: Creating change. When you lead change, you learn to operate in ambiguous situations, think strategically, make tough decisions and persevere in the face of adversity.
• Challenge 3: Significant accountabilities. By expanding your role in terms of scope, scale, time pressure and accountability, you learn what it takes to be decisive, to work and learn at a fast pace and to have significant impact.
• Challenge 4: Managing across boundaries. Assignments that require you to collaborate across functions and business units or to work with people over whom you have no authority will strengthen your ability to influence others.
• Challenge 5: Dealing with diversity. By working with people of another culture, gender or background, you will be better prepared to adapt to different expectations and persuade people of different backgrounds to work together.

Organisation face an increasing leadership shortage, not having sufficient leaders to meet their organisations future needs. Given this leadership crunch the way organisations approach the development of leaders is critical.

• Have you included these five challenges as key components of your leadership development programme?
• Have you included these five challenges as part of your personal leadership development?