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Previous Blogs.

That perfect world.

There is typically agreement that businesses, companies and organizations will benefit from employing leaders who have [and use] diverse leadership skills.

Just as typically, the odds of leaders using newly learned skills in the workplace are small, even if the company says it is interested in [dedicated to] employee improvement.

Why?

First of all, a leader hopes s/he works for a company that realizes the importance of continued [lifelong] skill learning. If s/he is very lucky, his/her company not only recognizes that importance, but also encourages them to gain and improve their leading and people skills. That encouragement might come in the form of company-supplied training and seminars, or in encouraging attendance and participation in skill-learning opportunities outside the workplace, such as at public workshops or community colleges.

Secondly, a leader hopes his/her company respects the new knowledge s/he receive at these sessions. Leaders hope their bosses will discuss their new ideas with them, help the leader to design a plan to allow the leader to implement them AND ENDORSE THE PLAN. How many times has it happened [and how deflating can it be] to return from training with new skills, thoughts and ideas and when leaders begin to implement those new concepts, they hear from their boss, "That's nice, but we don't do it that way."?

Now let's say that a leader DOES work for that special company, and that it successfully overcomes the two hurdles above. The onus [and challenge] now is on the leader, because it is now his/her responsibility [and challenge] to implement the skills they learned in the classroom. Transferring the skills from the learning session to the workplace usually takes some modification and always takes some time. The challenge is that leaders can't take that hour or two during the day WHEN THEY DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO to design and implement their new program. Practically speaking, they have to TAKE TIME from their already busy schedules to do this formulating.

If you don't now, I do hope that sometime in your working career you have the opportunity to work in that perfect world.

Wishing you Skilled Leadership,

Rick