Leadership is a critical component that dictates an organization’s success and sustainability. Successful institutions embrace succession planning where employees and junior leaders are trained and prepared for more complex and advanced responsibilities. However, leadership development and success can significantly challenge the institution. Effective leadership programs should empower the line managers who have a greater influence on employees to gain more skills to influence others and leaders. The leadership pipeline outlines the progress that institutions can adopt to enhance their leaders’ competencies and career development (Charan Drotter & Noel, 2011). A more comprehensive program should cover all aspects of the leadership pipeline; leading others, leading leaders, functional leaders, business leaders, group leaders, and enterprise leaders.
Frontline leaders development theory The leadership pipeline model provides six steps that organizations can use to bolster their line-managers competencies to be more effective. The first step in the leadership pipeline is leading others. Leading others allows leaders with little skills to be equipped with technical and professional skills. The skills help the leaders to gain broader individual skills to understand and accept corporates’ culture. Leading others allows employees to be better at initial responsibilities (Charan et al., 2011). The transition to leading others can be challenging because it requires a shift from value-based or behavioral attrition. The leading others phase integrates activities such as coaching and motivating others, assigning responsibilities, and time and resource reallocation. The leading others phase also requires the managers to shift their attitude from tolerating management tasks to valuing their essence. The leader has to shift the attention from an individual-focused mindset to the understanding value of team efforts and control. Managers to change their attitude towards managing others and managing themselves.
How to go about the development program
The first approach is conducting a needs assessment to identify whether line managers desire a leadership development program. The needs can be accessed by evaluating the performance appraisal reports. The complaint and compliment registers and other employees’ feedback forms. When the need is identified, it is crucial to engage the top management to gain their views and encourage them to support the leadership development activity (Gavin, 2018). Top leaders’ support is vital in accessing required resources, approving the coaching and training programs, and motivating line managers to enroll in the program. The next step is designing the coaching program, workers’ motivation training program, and policy. The policy outlines the eligibility criteria while the program specifies activities that will be undertaken.
Coaching and Workers’ motivation
The two critical activities that will be undertaken in the leadership development programs are coaching and mentorship. Coaching is a leadership development activity that enables a person to acquire knowledge and achieve greater skills through supervision. Coaching is a critical activity in helping leaders understand how to lead others. Coaching makes employees more competent in their responsibilities and allows internal reflection that enables them to identify their weaknesses and strengths.
Coaching activity
The top leadership can adopt different coaching steps during the leading others leadership development program to enhance their line-managers competencies in fostering the workforce commitment. The leaders can engage in five stages of the coaching relationship to ensure interaction efficiency. The first stage is relationship building which focuses on establishing trust between the coach and coaches. Relationship building involves leaders explaining themselves, highlighting the foundation of coaching relationships and establishing the ground rules (Gavin, 2018). The relationship specifications such as meeting frequency, place, and period are clarified during the first stage. The second stage is goal setting, which involves identifying the focus areas. The stage involves setting priorities, clarifying responsibilities, delegating duties, and improving the coach-coachee relationship.
The third stage is refining the goals and establishing a coaching plan (Armstrong, 2018). The stage is to ensure the goals are SMART and the plan is implementable. The goals should be mutually agreeable to all participants. The stage also involves developing monitoring tools and performance standards in which the progress can be evaluated. The fourth stage is feedback and reflection, which involves learning from experience. The stage involves the coachee and coach being comfortable providing feedback on the program’s impact. Feedback allows people to know and evaluate what they are learning and the program’s impact. Feedback also allows people to reflect and determine if the program aid realization of SMART goals (Ludeke et al., 2018). The last stage is termination and follow-up. Follow-up help in ascertaining whether the coachee learned and can apply the concepts.
The coaching program can help the line leaders learn soft skills critical to managing other employees. Line managers can be trained in soft skills, including communication, emotional intelligence, leadership, and time management. The coaching session will also enable the line managers to learn effective duty delegation. Delegating prevents leaders from micro-, managing employees or under-estimating their junior’s capabilities to deliver high-quality services. The communication skills training will also incorporate how the leaders would ensure an open communication structure that allows feedback. Line managers can facilitate open communication when they receive and provide feedback on the junior employees’ progress and performance. The coaches can use active listening and open question techniques to train line managers on how they can advance their competencies of line managers to deliver quality services. Active listening is a conscious activity that requires attention. Active listening is crucial in helping the coach and coachee establish SMART objectives and provide clear and constructive feedback (Burnett, 2018). Open questions generate curiosity, enhance thought provocation, help to understand deeper details, and bolster creativity.
Workers’ Motivation
Leaders influence their employees through inspiring by appealing to their intrinsic needs or rewarding them with different incentives. The leadership development program will also focus on how line managers can use incentives to motivate workers to achieve ideal performance. People are motivated by different things such as pay, recognition, type of work, work values, and organizational culture. It is crucial to train line managers on how they can apply different job design approaches to bolster their workers’ competitiveness. The line manager can be trained to apply job-reengineering by improving the work components to prepare them for advanced responsibilities. Job reengineering fosters employees’ intrinsic motivation by enabling them to apply their competencies (Charan et al., 2011). Line managers can also apply job enrichment by integrating additional advanced responsibilities to prepare employees for additional roles. Job enrichment proves to employees that the institution values their input and recognizes their capabilities.
Motivation program activities would also help line managers effectively apply monetary and non-monetary incentives to meet the employees’ expectations. Monetary incentives can offer short-term benefits while non-financial incentives and longer effects on employees. Line managers must understand how to motivate others without overstretching corporate resources. Leaders should understand how to motivate employees using non-monetary incentives such as recognition, and appreciation, providing them with SMART goals, ensuring workplace safety, embracing fairness and equity, and ascertaining workers’ job security (Burnett, 2018). The line managers should be informed of the need to establish an open communication framework that allows constant interaction and continuous feedback to avoid demotivation and resistance.
Extending the Plan
The plan can be expanded into other stages of the leadership development program by engaging top leadership and creating a more comprehensive mentorship program. The coaching program is ideal for leaders learning to lead others. Leaders learning how to inspire and influence other leaders., businesses, groups, and enterprise can advance their skills through executive coaching programs. The top leadership can identify line managers and other leaders and mentor them to gain advanced knowledge and skills to deliver high-quality services. Creating an executive leadership coaching program would allow top leaders to guide senior managers on how to ensure institutions’ sustainability. Executive coaching focuses on improving the existing performance, making them adapt to change, understand contemporary technology, and address their competency gaps (Gunn et al., 2016). Executive coaching enables the business executive to gain better insight into the corporate’s strategic goals and improve their competencies to bolster productivity and sustainability.
The company should develop an advanced program to improve employees’ emotional intelligence and cultural competencies to manage the prevailing work complexities effectively. The plan to enhance the leader’s competency in motivating workers can be advanced by focusing on higher skills crucial to achieving sustainability in the contemporary business environment. The contemporary workplace is multi-generational and cross-cultural. Thus, emotional intelligence and cultural competency are vital in ensuring equity and sustainable work practices. However, the top leaders must be actively involved in formulating and designing training programs to ensure leaders understand how to lead the multi-cultural community.
Conclusion
Leadership development is vital in succession planning because it prepares employees to take on advanced responsibilities. The leadership development program adopted is coaching, allowing senior leaders to direct and engage line managers on how to engage junior employees. Coaching advances the leaders’ technical and; leadership skills, making them more competent in delegating duties, measuring performance, and motivating employees. The program also allows executive coaching, where top leaders are trained to enhance their leadership skills. Besides, the program integrates motivation training where a leader is trained on how to appeal to their junior employees’ extrinsic and intrinsic needs. The program can be adapted in the future by training employees on how to advance through developing a training policy that requires all line managers to have a one-year mentorship and motivation training programs to lead others effectively. Top management support is vital in establishing elaborate coaching and training programs to ensure objective leadership development.
References
Burnett, N. (2018). “E-coaching: theory and practice for a new online approach to coaching.” (2018): 91-93.
Charan, R., Drotter, S., and Noel, J. (2011). The leadership pipeline: How to build the leadership powered company, (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. Skillsoft Books Business Pro Collection.
Gavin, C. S. (2018). The impact of leadership development using coaching. Journal of Practical Consulting, 6(1), 137-147.
Gunn, F., Lee, S.H. and Steed, M., 2017. Student perceptions of benefits and challenges of peer mentoring programs: Divergent perspectives from mentors and mentees. Marketing Education Review, 27(1), pp.15-26.
Ludecke, M., Rady, D., Rutherford, S. and Sawatzki, C. (2018). Coaching relationship breakdown: the emotional experience of being dumped. In International Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education 2018.
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