Leadership Roadmap Guide

Leadership is a powerful catalyst which can take any organizations to a great height, create
name, fame and brings many positive impact to the society. But if Leadership and leaders are
not good, it will lead the organizations down. So, Leadership is a great enabler for growth and
sustenance of business organizations, Governments, societies, trusts etc.
Traditionally, leadership was seen in terms of responsibility and ownership. In such a
perspective, leaders feel that they have the power and authority to take decisions and which
leads to the performance of organizations. Later, they found things can be done by monitoring
the sub-ordinates and gradually started controlling them. Gradually, the organization climate
become slowly disturbed and victimized. On long run, Companies suffer competitive losses
due to bureaucratic and autocratic culture. In modern days, Leadership has been evolved, many
research has been conducted regarding effective leadership management. Leaders realizing that
by guiding their sub-ordinate and developing them in early stage helps in achieving
organizations desired goal or target. This has already been seen that, organizations which
invests capital/resources in building leadership has been outperformed others.
For Success of any organization, it is important to set mission and vision statement. All
Employees of the organization should be aware of it. Mission and Vision statement guides the
organizations culture. If any organization builds a strong and great culture, then success
becomes easier for them.
Vision of the company defines its need of leader development or leadership development or
both. For short-term success leader development is required, but for long-run success it is
important for leadership development from within organization. Vision statement should be
imbibed in every employees value system.
One big question is who should drive the leadership program. Is it HR manager, Business
manager or CEO or Someone else. Everyone may have different opinion on it. My opinion on
it will be, there should be a different department for leadership development. There should be
a different leadership team who will monitor the program, evaluate, assessment, modify the
program and identify the talents. Leadership team or learning team will report to chief Human
resource officer. Human resource officer will be will be responsible for career development of
employees and identification of vacant positions and job creation. Leadership team will help
in developing those employee as per requirement of organization.
Training should be for three levels of employees. First level is the entry level employees; they
should be trained for adapting the organizations culture before they were given any assignment.
Middle-level managers should learn by doing their own work. They should be given a basic
training/session on introspection and how to learn new things from same work. Top-level
employees should be trained for succession planning of organizations and for key strategic
position of organization. For developing the career roadmap of an employee, there should be a
strong Human resource team who should be facilitate. It should be an important factor for an
organization to hire right talent and develop them.
As I have mentioned earlier, Leadership is a powerful catalyst, which has the power to take
organizations into great height or it may lead to down of business. For leadership position it is
important to have a right leader in place. Identifying a right candidate has been a great challenge
for any organization. Studying Human being is itself a complex subject matter and identifying
and matching a right person to the leadership role in an organization which is having its own
dynamics becomes more challenging. But According to some modern research work, it has
become little simpler for identifying the type of personality and its matching to some extend to
the organizations culture, values and roles. Many organizations use different tools to identify
 emerging leaders like MBTI test, Psychometric testing, etc. Sometimes organizations also put
emerging leaders in an assessment center to evaluate persons behavior, skills, abilities,
emotional stability, interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills etc.
Assigning new
roles to emerging
leaders

Evaluation of Program
and Modification of
Program

Leadership
Program

Pre-Leadership
Program

Identifying early
potentials or rising
leaders

Leaders or
Leadership
Development

Requirement
analysis and why
it is important

Organizations
Mission and Vision

Fig. 1. Leadership Roadmap

It has been seen that, people who are undergoing those test are aware of those things and
sometimes for social status and prestige, they try to manipulate right answers. It leads to wrong
choosing of individuals for leadership role. The investment on leadership development will go
in vain. Such situations do arise and it becomes a great headache for organizations and
department. For such instances, there should be a pre-leadership module designed for the
emerging leaders. In modern concepts leadership has D-A-C. When there is a direction, and it
is aligned with the mission, vision of the organization and there is commitment. Then it seems
that leadership has happened. It is very important for an organization to identify potential
candidates with high commitment. After identifying those emerging leaders, organization
should give challenging tasks along with their daily tasks to make themselves different from
other employees. They should be evaluated thoroughly by means of 360-degree feedback and
other anonymous surveys and feedbacks. They should be watched for at least a quarter before
going for leadership training. Generally, Leaders have great enthusiasm and are passionate
about leading organization along with people. After observing for a quarter, true leadership
traits will be visible in them. I believe that, Leadership can be built only if they little spark in
them, else it will be very difficult to develop leaders.
Emerging leaders can be identified easily. When they were given free will, they have three
options to choose. One is to act proactively and do some productive work useful to the self at-
least. Those kind of people will sense that what kind of problems will come accordingly they
will try to solve the problem. Second option is to be reactive in nature, if a problem comes then
they will try to solve them. And third kind of people are those who are in-active to the situation.
Even after problems or crisis comes, they will not react to the situation and try to push it to
others and escape the situation.
After identification of emerging leaders, organizations need to train them according to their
future roles and responsibility. Leadership training should be mix of on-the-job and off-the-
job program. Leadership program on-the-job should be basically, giving them special projects
which will help them in developing risk taking ability and decision making skills. They will be
provided with an inspirational leader within organization as a mentor. Understanding of
functional knowledge is very important for any leader. During this period, they should be
trained in cross-functional business units to understand organizations whole business unit.
This actually enables them to take decisions and risks confidently with overall business
impacts.
Leaders should learn by themselves, self-learning and quick smart learning is important for
them. There should be a module for collaborative learning where participants can take learnings
from others and give their opinions. Participants should take the learnings, personal insights
into ones own values, attitude and believe system. A successful Leaders should be creative
and innovative in his/her approach in solving a problem. They should be broad-minded and
open to take lessons from everywhere like societies, nature or different organizations.
Training for leadership is as important as the mode of delivering the courses. There are many
methods to deliver the contents like coaching, mentoring, on-the-job training, off-the-job
training, Action planning, job-based development, Managers guide etc., It purely depends on
the firms culture, type of business, geographical location and the countrys culture. The culture
in-sense like individualism, collectivism, power distance, sensitivity etc. Countries which are
having individualistic culture are more likely performs single handedly rather than doing in
team. If a country having high power distance, employees will be more likely follow the orders
and follow a methodological work. It will be very difficult for them to show their creativity. If
a countrys culture is collectivism, then they will love to work in team work and share a
collaborative learning among them. If a country is having low power distance, then it is
expected to be employees are more creative and they work independently. These are few of
parameters to be looked open for preparing the training module.
Every leader should know about change management. Rate of Learning should be more than
rate of change of other factors like environment, situations, technology etc. Coping with change
is an important factor for any leaders and organizations. World is changing in rapid phase. The
change in process, thought, innovation, technology should be much faster than the change in
environment, other organizations.
A separate module should be there for new business development. Leaders should be trained
on acquiring more business and create new market for existing business. They should try to
implement blue ocean strategy for business development.
Finally, they should be given training on inspirational leadership, how to lead a team by their
own examples. If this thing happens, programs becomes a successful one. Here, they should be
trained in team work, personality development, mentoring sub-ordinates to achieve goals
instead of ordering them. If a collaborative culture is developed instead of a competitive
culture, there will be a sustainable growth in organization.
Finally, after implementation of leadership program, Evaluation of program is important. The
program should give sufficient returns for the organizations. In Leadership program it is very
difficult to calculate the ROI. But the effectiveness of program can be calculated by taking
regular feedback from the participants. There should be a 360-degree feedback system for
participants. After the program, organization should conduct surveys to how leadership training
has make an impact in the overall climate of the organization. Few tangible benefits can be
seen in terms of productivity of employees, business or revenue growth of the firm etc., but
Leadership program may be the one of the reason for growth, there will be certainly other
success factors. After the implementation of program, it is very important for organization to
give new roles and responsibility to the participants, so that they will feel challenged and
motivated to work. Else slowly they will move out of the organization for a better position.
Future planning is every important for an organization. Chief human resource officer should
be held responsible for allocating emerging leaders for particular job positions.

Thank you