By Wes Ball. Wes is a strategic innovation consultant and author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining success (Westlyn Publishing, 2008) and writes for Leadership turn every Tuesday. See all his posts here. Wes can be reached at www.ballgroup.com.Building future leaders takes creative nurturing, because leaders are both born AND made.  It’s up to us to do the “making” part.

There is a lot of failure on the track to leadership competence.  It’s doubtful any of the leaders I know could have gotten there, if they had not been nurtured through failure.  Even so-called “natural” leaders that have the combination of dominant and influencing personality styles need nurturing to make them successful.

A couple of weeks ago, CandidProf (guest blogger every Thursday) made note of the 2008-2009 standards for grading policy of the Dallas School District.  He expressed some concern about the fact that, in an effort to reduce the high school dropout rate, this school district mandated that teachers give students multiple chances to pass tests, not give any student a “zero” score for any test or assignment (no matter what they did or did not do), and accept overdue assignments with no or minimal penalty.

While the policy seems like an easy one to condemn and seems to embody all the laziness and attitudes of entitlement we see in young persons applying for jobs these days, there are some interesting aspects of this that have application in business leadership development.  Many persons have complained that this kind of approach to education in no way mirrors what those students might encounter in the working world.  The reality, however, is that good management that has as its objective to develop strong leaders does use similar techniques.

The problem may be not so much in the policy itself, but rather in the lack of accountability that this approach seems to provide.  I would go further and say that the real problem is that students are not given any vision for why they need to learn what is being taught.  Every person needs to understand why they must do something painful — and learning can be very painful for children without a proper vision for the future.  Employees also need that kind of vision-casting.   Without a clear vision for why they are required to work harder and learn more, most people will resist.

Every leader I know has been nurtured by a mentor.  Every one has been given the opportunity to fail along with support to understand how to succeed. Everyone has been given the opportunity to make mistakes within defined boundaries, because learning happens best in such an environment.

Within my own company, I made a point of creating mentoring relationships with and among employees.  I continually created opportunities for employees to learn through failure while providing a “safety net” that meant they knew they would not be fired for failure, except in certain areas of behavior or where there was a clear indication that they were not capable of doing the job needed.  They certainly were not put in a position where a failure could irreversibly harm the company, because that would have been bad leadership.  But they were given the chance to experiment with making decisions and even making recommendations to our customers where appropriate to the level that they had proven themselves capable.

I was extremely successful in taking persons with little or no experience and making them not only highly-skilled in the difficult and somewhat obtuse business of strategic innovation consulting, but also capable of leadership of others.  In fact, I discovered that it was far better for me to develop an inexperienced but motivated and qualified person into a leadership role over time than it ever was to hire a person already experienced through another company.  It was far too painful trying to overcome the bad learning that the experienced person had gained somewhere else.

The secret to nurturing and developing these future leaders was simple in concept:

• Give them a vision of what the future could look like for them.
• Give them an “identity” as being part of a great organization that is doing something of real value.
• Give them the basic skills and relational training they needed.
• Provide them with “safe” ways to fail, followed by nurturing learning as to how to succeed next time.
• Encourage them in failure and success.
• Let them grow as quickly as they can take it, always supported by continuing encouragement, nurturing, and training.
• Give them public praise when they have proven themselves of real leadership value.

The results were a highly motivated team that was (by measurements common to our industry) about twice as efficient as the average per salary dollar invested.  They also were a cohesive team that liked each other and liked working there.  And we were able to gain the kinds of clients that even much larger competitors only dreamed of getting.  The biggest problems we had were from experienced persons who thought they should be given the chance to “lead” before they even understood what our company was all about.

So, if you want to develop strong future leaders (or just good employees), I would say the Dallas schools idea is not a bad one; it just requires strong vision-casting, nurturing, and encouragement to make it work.  

What do you think?

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Image credit: thanx  CC license