Simply speaking, leadership is about supporting people and teams to be successful. If you apply that to a professional workforce, the first consideration is around what constitutes success? Obviously, there are some hard measures around achieving targets, meeting budgets, producing outcomes for clients on time and to set specifications; but there are also some less obvious notions to consider around supporting staff to be ‘happy’ in their roles (wanting to stay working with and for you); providing stretch and opportunity to high performers; building strong relationships with stakeholders and modelling the right behaviours.

One of the tricks is that this picture of leadership – to many observers – is all about ‘soft’ people stuff. Yes it certainly is about relationships but also seeks to apply some hard thinking about the sorts of skills we need to develop in leaders to deal with those things that cause most damage and frustration in work situations - issues that involve people, communication, poor expectation management, conflict that remains largely unresolved and so on. One of the reasons that I think we dismiss the ‘soft’ skills (a term I find troublesome) is that we are so lousy at applying them – particularly skills around conflict management, difficult conversations and assertive communications. You’ll be relieved to know that for most people that’s true outside of work as well as at work!

With the best of intentions, we’ve created mediocre leadership development and leadership training programs for some time and have thrown money and energy at leadership training that has achieved limited results. We continue to look for simple solutions to complex problems and – in many cases – it’s pretty easy to predict that there will be no positive outcomes. Yet at the same time the appetite to invest in very challenging leadership growth is sometimes not there, particularly when asking senior leaders to actively play a part!

So how do we support the growth of new leaders?

Here are a few simple discussion points for us to consider

1. Choose leaders well and for the right reasons Across the professions, there’s a history of career progression equating to a management or leadership role - the best physician becomes the Director of Medicine / the best lawyer becomes the Managing Partner. We reward their professional expertise by putting them in charge and then ask them to do things that don’t relate to the expertise that got them there.

While there’s nothing wrong with that in itself, we need to be clear when appointing people into leadership roles that they understand the content of their work will be different. Their focus in enabling the success of the firm or their team will be through other people and will focus around communication of vision; strategy development; resource management; relationship management; team development and not primarily around the subject matter expertise in their professional field. If their heart isn’t in leading, they’ll be ordinary (at best).

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