When it comes to leadership development, most organizations think of skill development. According to a live poll conducted with L&D professionals, “companies are investing around 70% of their resources for skill development.” In fact, companies have understood that skill development is fundamental to any organization’s culture and strategy.
However, there are other key areas that companies should focus on. But most of the companies consider skill development as the priority. Whereas in leadership management, the importance of skill set is only 25%. The other essential factors of leadership development include performance, mental, emotional, and moral development.
Employees are more likely to replace the word “success” with “significance” and “happiness” with “fulfillment.” At the same time, it’s equally important for an employee to understand their contribution to the company. Also, the employees must look at leadership as an opportunity to showcase their skills and help organizations grow.
If you want to understand the significant developmental areas in leadership, it's essential to know the four quadrants of leadership development. You will also get to know the influences of moral development in general.
The Four Quadrants Of Leadership Development
Leadership development isn’t a short-term or long-term event to be conducted. It’s a process that consists of four types of developments to create the biggest impact. Let’s delve into the four development types you need to focus on:
Skill Development
You can find multiple numbers of attributes that are linked with leadership development. Moreover, our researchers have found four essential leadership skills for any role or level. Suppose you’re a manager or an individual contributor or a senior executive. You must learn these key concepts, including self-awareness, communication, influence and learning agility.
Performance Development
Performance is usually taken for granted by professionals in most cases. If employees could work really hard and achieve their goals, they’ve mastered the performance skill. In fact, productivity is an individual achievement that is made possible only when they’re ready to go beyond mastery. People must get into the process, optimization and interdepartmental alignment to achieve.
Mental And Emotional Development
A leader’s mental state is the most critical predictor of their success. The reason is, if you know how they feel, then it’s easy to find what they think. Without mental and emotional development, leadership challenges will be more due to a lack of capacity.
Mental and emotional development is all about the self-awareness that identifies not just who you are today. But it will go one step further and identify what you become tomorrow. With the help of emotional development, leaders will get the capacity to handle their own emotions.
Moral Development
According to the developmental models that we have discussed, psychological growth will make people think more. As a result, people will think more about the surrounding success instead of thinking about their own success.
The growth of maturity and wisdom is the reason for this shift in the perspective of individuals. People should understand leadership as a social responsibility and know its values. Leaders must know the real values and work in order to advance the growth of organizations and society.
Why Is Moral Development Important?
In recent times, employees worldwide are more interested in leadership as they care about social responsibility.
Bob Chapman, CEO of the St. Louis-based manufacturing company Barry-Wehmiller, has expressed his thoughts “business could be the most powerful force for good in the world, if leaders would embrace the awesome responsibility of leadership.”
He also added that “caring for people and giving them meaning, purpose and fulfillment through their work is not in disharmony with creating value.” If you want to prioritize moral development in your organization, then follow these actions:
1. Identify The Social Injustices In Your Organization
You need to understand the root cause of problems and find potential solutions for them. This can be related to salary issues that people find not equitable for men and women in your organization. Then, it’s important to identify why this inequality exists and create a long-term plan to distribute fair salaries for all.
2. Review Your Plan
If you look at potential leaders in key positions, you will find how they are ethical. You will also find how they deal with their approach to handling people, as it’s the responsibility of a leader to recognize and care about their organization.
3. Emphasize Morality With Mentorship
Mentorship is essential for any organization to achieve its goals. Find the best coaches and mentors who work to fill those moral development gaps. This will bridge the gaps in individual minds and help them set goals accordingly.
4. Hold Your Senior Executives Accountable
It’s influential in any organization to identify the values and behaviors that are hard to tolerate. However, you can handle this with consistent corporate social contracts.
Therefore, there are four types of leadership development, including skill, performance, emotional and moral. In these factors, the first three are very essential for an organization to survive and succeed.
The last, moral development, can be optional for the organization. But it is indispensable and can’t be excluded from society, as people identify organizations that lack morality easily. It’s evident that people’s opinion matters and can strongly influence the options to be imperative.
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