Sink or Swim

Promotion to a leadership role is the frequent and obvious reward for great performance.  On the surface, it makes perfect sense: talent, commitment and experience are the critical pre-requisites for a leadership role, right? Well, yes, they are – until they’re not…

All new leaders endeavour to shine in their role. Yet often, a new manager will be faced with typical leadership challenges without being formally equipped with critical leadership skills: giving effective feedback, having valuable conversations, leading through change and building team cohesion.

Expecting an emerging leader to achieve great outcomes without formally and consciously developing their leadership capabilities is a surprisingly common but costly oversight. It puts unnecessary pressure not only on a dedicated high performer and the team they lead, but also the peer group they collaborate with and the customers they serve.

Being a great leader requires awareness, tenacity and determination. It means expanding mindset, developing techniques, and bringing an extra level of maturity, context and experience to the table. Capable, successful leaders have acquired considerable knowledge, practised and applied what they’ve learnt, made mistakes and tried again.

We rely on this mastery in leadership roles and relying on trial and error is too costly, both to individuals and the business. To build consistent, sustainable leadership depth in our organisation, we need to put in place development programs that support emerging leaders to grow their leadership skills through knowledge acquisition, practice, reflection and embedding. When we offer this scaffolding alongside a promotion, we’re making sure that the careful recruitment choice we’ve made will be successful and enduring: lower attrition rates, more cohesive teams, improved wellbeing and hitting our strategic goals.

Our innovative Emerging Leader Program was designed to build leadership capability to businesses experiencing growth or transformation. The program develops skills essential for effective leadership, including how to build a positive team culture, managing conflict, coaching staff and delivering excellent customer service. It includes an evidence-based emotional intelligence diagnostic that is delivered to each learner by an accredited consultant to identify strength and opportunity areas.

Lysander has recently partnered with industry association AusContact to deliver this award-winning program for clients across Australia, taking organisations on truly transformational learning journeys.

Click here if you’d like to find out more about the program or download the program brochure.

Carving-out Career Pathways

One of the constant challenges we face in business is how to keep talent engaged and interested, particularly if we work in organisations with flatter structures or where formal promotional pathways are more limited. Recognition and reward are important, but so too is the challenge that high-performers often seek but find rarer to encounter after being in a role for a long period of time.

A parallel challenge exists when leaders need to step out for short periods of time and find their tasks piling up around them. How often do leaders taking leave for a short break put in more hours leading into and on return to compensate for the precious time out? Sustainable leadership requires depth in teams so that strong individuals can competently step in and manage if a leader is on leave or absent for a short period.

A well-designed leadership development program for high-potential employees can address both these challenges, easing pressure for leaders as well as providing important stretch and recognition for these high performing team members. We can equip team members to step up and take the helm at these opportune moments by helping them to strengthen not only their understanding of processes and systems, but just as importantly, to build their awareness of and insight into how it is to be a leader.

Equipping high-potential employees to step confidently into acting or covering leadership roles creates an engaged and fulfilled workforce, where high performers are challenged and recognised for their efforts. And it means that we, as leaders, are able to manage our own time away from our team or business with confidence – reducing some of the stress and complexity we experience as a leader. 

Our High Potential Consultant Program was designed to provide organisations with the opportunity to develop their high-performing staff to become formidable future leaders. Lysander has recently partnered with industry association AusContact to deliver this award winning program for clients across Australia, taking organisations on truly transformational learning journeys. The program is designed to extend the capabilities of high-performing individuals and equip them to create brilliant customer and member services, add value to both their team and customers, and develop foundational leadership skills to prepare them for future leadership roles. Click here if you’d like to find out more about the program or download the brochure.