Leadership Development Is Probably The Easiest Way To Improve Your Organisation

As I (Neil Jurd OBE) say at the very start of “The Leadership Book“, good leadership makes the world a better place.  More than 15 years of working directly in leadership development have shown this to be a resounding truth, good leadership makes teams happier and more productive.  But conversely, bad leadership makes the world a much worse place, and sadly there is a lot of bad or mediocre leadership out there.

Most organisations have little or no leadership development, and most managers have had little or no leadership development.  They may have had some technical training, and perhaps some training in procedural aspects of being a manager – things like absence reporting or approving leave, but they will have no real idea about how to have a leadership impact.  This means that even a small amount of leadership development training can have a huge impact.  It is like teaching someone who can’t swim to swim – there is a huge difference between being able to swim a bit and drowning, and in the same way there is a huge difference between being able to lead a bit and having no idea what to do.

Leadership is simple, but it is often presented in very confusing terms.  Good leadership really just comes down to connecting with having a clear sense of direction and connecting well with people; Connection and Direction.  I recorded a short video which explains this and which you might want to share.

Good leaders connect with people, building positive relationships.  And they also take time to think about and then set clear direction.  Beyond that one of the most important things a leader can do is to have the courage to get out of the way and the people in their team take ownership of situations and think, decide and act for themselves.  As long as the leader has been clear about the direction the organisation is going in, and well-selected people have been trained well, then the leader can allow the team a great deal of freedom.

On our leadership courses we create situations where delegates can practice leading in this way.  We run leadership development courses for managers all over the UK, and we base our courses around a core of Experiential Leadership Projects, which are often complex problems which the leader and team have to navigate together.

Underperforming organisations tend to focus on managing the organisation harder; tighter controls, less activity, more checks.  There is also a tendency to create ambitious and usually lengthy strategic plans, but these plans are likely to fail – or indeed to never really cross the start line without an effective leadership culture.  With good leadership even a bad plan can be good enough but with bad leadership even the best plan has pretty much no chance of success.

So before tightening up management procedures and crating complex plans, it is worth first looking at the standard of leadership and leadership development in your company.  If leadership isn’t great, that is where you need to start.  And leadership development can be remarkably easy – just downloading some of our free leadership resources will help, and buying managers a copy of The Leadership Book and running a book-club event with them would have a significant impact, and even running training can be surprisingly cheap – we have online courses for less than £40 per person.

If you are interested in leadership development for your business, university of school, please contact us here.