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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By CandidProf, our regular Thursday guest author. Read all of CandidProf here.

I have been teaching college students since 1984 (starting as a TA in graduate school).  I have been at my current institution since 1994.  In 24 years of dealing with students entering college, the quality of preparation for those students seems to fall every year.

I see parents and schools setting students up for failure in college, and this worries me.  Entering students do not know how to study.  They do not know how to do work outside of class.  They do not know how to use outside resources.  They have such a poor vocabulary that many words that are routinely used in technical fields go completely over their heads.  They have such poor math skills that nearly 75% of them are required to take remedial mathematics before they can even take their first college math class.  Worse, we now offer three math classes for college credit that are below the level of the lowest level math class (offered as a remedial class for no college credit) that was available when I began college.  And, students expect that they will pass a class by simply showing up for it.  How did this come to be?

Part of the problem is that parents and politicians put pressure on schools to make it easier on their little darlings. In a rather sad case, an unpopular math teacher was dismissed from a suburban high school where I live because parents complained that she was far too tough on her students.  She gave them way too much homework, and her tests were much tougher than the other math teachers’ tests, forcing her students to study for hours each week outside of class.  Interestingly, her students also scored the highest on state mandated standardized achievement tests as well as higher than other teachers’ students on the quantitative portion of the SAT and on the math AP exams.  Still, she was tough, so they fired her.

Recently, the Dallas school district implemented new policies aimed at preventing dropouts and making sure that students have a better education.  At least, that is what they said the new policies are for.  In my opinion, they are setting students up for failure.  The new policies require teachers to accept late work without penalizing students.

Does this teach the students that they have to meet deadlines?  When they get a job, will their boss allow them to complete jobs when they feel like it instead of meeting a deadline?  Homework can only be counted towards the students’ grades if it does not lower their grade.  So, there is no incentive to actually do homework.  There is no penalty for not doing it.  And teachers are not permitted to give a zero on any assignment or exam that is missed without personally speaking with parents and offering personal assistance to the students to assist them in doing the assignment.

Of course, teachers are not paid to provide assistance to students who don’t want to do the work, so how many are actually going to take time to do that?  They’ll just turn in something on the student’s behalf and get the whole matter behind them.

If students get a grade on an exam that they don’t like, they have the right to retake the exam and keep the higher grade.  A clarification to the rule that came out later indicates that the rule is meant to allow students to retake the same exam (with the same questions) as often as they wish and to keep the highest exam.

So, they can not study, take the exam, find out what questions are on it, go study them, retake the same exam (with the same questions), and then if they still didn’t get the answers right keep on taking the same exam.  And, according to district policy, no grade lower than a 50 is permitted.  After all, a failing grade harms the students self esteem.

This policy teaches students that they don’t need to work or study.  It teaches them that there is no penalty for not doing what you are assigned or for not doing it in an acceptable manner.  It teaches them that deadlines are optional.  It teaches them that learning is optional.  It teaches them that they have to take no responsibility at all for their learning. So, what are they learning that will help them when they get a job or go to college?  Basically, it is ingraining in them habits that doom them to failure.

There is so much wrong with this that I don’t know what to say.  It is defeating as an educator to see this sort of thing coming along.  Of course, some of these students may take my classes.  I maintain standards, so they will try to just show up and expect to pass the class.  They will fail.  It will make me look like a bad instructor to administrators and people outside the college who don’t know what is going on.

I can not teach an entire K – 12 curriculum and still cover college level material.  But if I lower my standards, then I am doing a disservice to those students who do want to learn.

If too many of us in college lower our standards, and I see college faculty all over the country lowering standards because that is the easy thing to do, then that will ultimately make a college degree as worthless as a high school diploma from one of these school districts that adopt these policies that are so counterproductive to learning.

It is no wonder that so many of the best and brightest teachers are leaving the profession.  It is simply too discouraging to know that what you are doing is pointless.

I guess, though, that holding your ground, even under outside pressure to do the wrong thing, is one of the things that separates a good leader from a bad one.

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