Leadership Capabilities Development Plan

Your executives are probably getting briefed on the measurable traits of high-performing leaders before they're going into talent meetings where they're choosing which individuals to invest their development dollars in.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have these as a way to guide your leadership development plan for yourself?

I'm going to walk you through them. I help women who want to build careers that they love by driving their own development to do that.

So the premise is building your own development plan and focusing on the leadership attributes that have been shown by research to predict high-performing leaders is probably a good way to go.

I have a development planning template that's focused on these, which you can get at fullpotentialrealized.com/leader

These are the Seven Signposts. KornFerry has a framework which is based on 30 years of research. And seven is a lot so I'm not going to say that all leadership teams use all of them, but these are the ones that are predictive. Some leadership teams use some of them, or one of them, and some use all of them. So just to get the lay of the land, I'm going to walk you through all seven.

The first one: track record of formative experiences. These are experiences where, for instance, you have a lot of strategic demands or you have a high level of people demands, you might have had to negotiate, you might have had to have external relations. These are experiences that shape how you lead and change you by going through them. The more formative experiences, the better.

Because the more you process the information and have it in your bones, then the less you need to figure it out at a higher level when you need all of your bandwidth to deal with the complexity of a senior role.

Second one is learning agility. The ability to learn from a current experience and take those lessons and apply them in the next experience, so you can hit the ground running, so that you're adaptable, so you can figure things out even if it's ambiguous or if there's a lot of complexity.

Third one self-awareness. Do you know what your strengths are, do you know what your weaknesses are, and do you know how you impact others, how you are perceived by others.

Fourth one: leadership traits. For this one you have to look at your organization's profile because these are going to vary depending on the industry you're in, depending on the function that you're doing. For instance, I was just looking at a profile today called "ADAPT" which is like self-disrupting leaders and that's for an organization that's working in a space that is constantly evolving and constantly changing. These leaders need to be adaptive. And so they need to trust, they need to form partnerships, they need to have an ongoing scan of what's going on. That might be different than traditional leadership attributes which might be more relevant in different industries. Those might be something like influence, energy level, optimism, visioning... the more traditional things. The thing there is to see what's important for your organization and for your function and to work towards developing those leadership attributes if that's something that is an area that's a priority for you.

The next one, number five: drive to be a leader. This one is more innate I think. Most of these you can develop, and you can even develop aspects of this one, but this one is: do you like to lead other people? Does it does it feel juicy for you to get results through others? Because some people want to be individual contributors and some people love to lead others. It takes a lot of energy to lead people when it's not something that lights you up innately. But I would I would argue that if you learn to be a  better leader you'll like it more. So it's something that you can develop over time, and I think it's useful to develop it because you don't know what you want to do in the future and you don't know if that's going to require leadership. 

Developing leadership, whether you think you want to do that in the future or not, is going to be valuable for you no matter what you do.

Sixth one is aptitude for logic and reasoning. This one is your cognitive ability or your smarts. Again that's innate, but part of this is the ability to solve complex problems, which you can develop, and as you rise in an organization it's less important for you to be able to solve complex problems and it becomes more important for you to foster an environment where other people can solve complex problems. So if you can lead other people to solve problems that's one of the key parts of cognitive ability that stands out in this research around what predicts good leaders and that's something that can be developed.

The last one is managed derailment risks. This is my favorite one. Derailment risks are like doesn't relate well to others, lacks composure, political missteps, doesn't foster the development of talent...This is more of something that you have to unlearn rather than learning. And it's getting the lay of the land of what are the top derailers that many executives face - and 30 to 50 percent of high potential leaders face derailment - because of these there's 19 or 17 of them so learning just what they are and just having them on your radar screen and seeing if there's something you need to intervene for your own habits or ways of being. And maybe you have to unlearn something that's going to get in your way. I think it's earlier to start prep... the earlier you start practicing dealing with it the better.

So those are the Seven Signposts. Again if you want to access the development planning template that's built around these, check it out at fullpotentialrealized.com/leader