Leadership For Competitive Advantage

2. Organisational Capabilities
Leaders must build and maintain organisations that use cross-functional and virtual teams to get work done quickly and effectively. To do this, leaders will need such skills as:

• Strong communication and motivational skills
• Learn how to function as organisational architects engaged in systems thinking
• Ability to understand and address cross- cultural issues
• Ability to develop leaders at every level within the organisation

3. Developing Future Leaders
Developing emerging leaders is critical to the success of any organisation. Experienced leaders need to learn how to be effective practitioners of leadership development. To carry out this role, leaders will need to learn:

• New approaches and techniques for leadership development
• The principles of Action Learning with its emphasis on application
• How to best use current competencies and/or develop new ones to address new organisational challanges or problems

These three categories of leadership competencies set a high standard for anyone currently serving in a leadership role or aspiring to leadership.

It is our belief that many of the prevailing approaches to leadership development do not provide the integration of concepts and learned behaviors needed in today's organisation.

Using the research of Dr Conger, as well as our practical experience working with a wide variety of organisations, we have identified a more comprehensive competency model we call Leadership for Competitive Advantage.

We believe these core competency areas are critical to the development of strong individual leaders, highly productive leadership teams and organisations that can achieve and sustain high performance.

As this model suggests, there are 10 key core competency areas that should be developed in today's leaders.

With this model as a framework, we have designed a leadership development approach that provides organisations with a way to identify needed competencies, develop and enhance these competencies, and reinforce the on-going practice of these competencies to produce sustainable, positive change within the organisation.

If you ask managers where they learned their leadership abilities, they will often tell you that their job experiences and bosses have contributed the most. Rarely will formal training be mentioned, despite the number of programs being designed and implemented.

We believe a structured approach using normal at work activities as the focus for review and learning is the key. The competencies diagram becomes the learning agenda and progress measuring tool.

In practice this means regular review sessions where coaching through collaboration with peers and external experts is applied on a programmed basis.

This methodology works because credibility and authenticity lie at the centre of leadership, determining and defining one's own guiding beliefs and assumptions lie at the heart of becoming a good leader.

By focusing on the individual, providing structured feedback, and prompting reflection, individual development programs can stimulate an important self-discovery process.

Processes emanating from material like Dr Stephen Covey's habits' books assist us in facilitating this process.

As clarity in the meaning and power of the core competencies increases among the top leaders of the organisation and they begin to more routinely reflect them in their daily activities attention can turn to the wider organisation.

Through normal forums including divisional meetings and project team meetings the facilitator can begin to introduce the philosophies that now represent the leadership or value to others' culture. Once such momentum occurs the resulting culture shift becomes apparent quite quickly.

By nurturing such an environment the organisation has developed a sustainable competitive advantage that is not easily recognised, and is slow in duplicating by competitors.