As learning and development Manager, I found organisations were keen to search talents and nurture them as leaders. Organisations were keen to identify leadership traits in younger, middle and senior level executives and hiring external consultants to develop them as leaders to fill up leadership positions and for future succession planning.
Finding talents is not an easy task and above all retaining them is an herculean task. Even if you found talents and retained them by creating faster career progression and paying extra bucks, the organisations hardly get desired results due to organisational cultural issues like poor support from colleagues, politics within teams and lack of delegations and clarity of roles of individual team members etc.
I believe even if your quality of seed is of highest quality, if you have not taken care of land by removing weeds, the chances of yielding higher productivity is very very less despite putting manure and water in timely manner.
I believe that an average employee can also perform better, if organisational culture is being taken care of. You have to understand individual employee strengths, provide them all necessary tools and resources in time, listen to their ideas and suggestions, make your organisation’s processes dynamic and people friendly and have open and honest PMS.
I believe home is the best place to nurture leadership traits for children and parents should be like mentors and coaches. A child has tremendous potential to do miracle in life, if leadership traits start germinating as early as possible. We just have to ensure the friendly environment for them. Sharing our experiences with them rather than showing them a particular path is the best one. Higher expectations from them generally put our children under tremendous psychological pressure, which compromise their self -believe and self-esteem. The childhood conditions impact a lot in building a good human being and it is an obstacle in making them a future leader. Making them mature, responsible and good human being is the best way of their development and growth. Offer them opportunities to explore themselves the future career paths by allowing them to try out various interests even at the cost of failures at times.
We need lot of leaders in every field and almost all wake of life in every society and there is absolute shortages of leaders. I believe our schools do have responsibility to focus on this aspect than making them knowledge savy, which in this uncertain and ever changing world may not offer enough opportunity to explore a healthy and happy life.
DK's World 