What Kind of Leaders Are You Promoting?

Leader Promotion Should Consider the Ability to Create & Susain Highly Effective Teams

When was the last time your organization promoted someone into a leadership role? What criteria factored into how the decision was made?

Too often, such promotion decisions are made without considering whether a leader (or potential leader) can create and sustain highly effective teams. Perhaps this isn’t surprising when we learn that few organizations include this as part of their leadership development programs. And even fewer organizations go so far as to assess leaders on their ability to build highly effective teams.

When we consider the nature of leadership, it’s about a person’s ability to expand the collective capacity of others to achieve a common goal. Leadership is about building social capital, strengthening connections among people, building trust, collaboration and communication in service of achieving results.

Leader promotions too often fail to consider a person’s ability to create and sustain highly effective teams as a core criterion. If we believe that leaders are only as good as the teams they lead, then this is a problem. If we don’t believe that it’s important, then we’re just promoting skilled individual contributors – not leaders.

For organizations that want to move the dial on overall performance, they can start by including leadership development – not just leader development – in their existing programs. They can extend this further by ensuring that the ability to create and sustain highly effective teams is a key consideration in leader promotion decisions. This can be assessed by using instruments like the Team Assessment Survey which includes several benchmarks for comparison and can even integrate customer or client feedback on results.

Check out our new resources page for leaders and teams.

#Teams #LeadershipDevelopment #TeamLeadership