Different Approaches to Leadership Development

Does this following scenario sound familiar? You’ve done well over the years demonstrating your technical skills and have been trained to a point that you’ve continued to enjoy rising through the ranks. Then, one Friday afternoon your boss says to you ‘congratulations Jo, we think you’re ready to run a team of people; you start Monday. Good luck.’

And over that week-end you think to yourself a combination of ‘about time’ and ‘oh my God, how on earth do you do that?!’

Yes, you’ve just stepped across the thin line from the field of management into the world of people leadership. Except that there’s a world of difference.

At Wentworth people, first up we seek to empathise with this reality on our leadership development programmes. This universal truth described above is fused with a deep understanding of the nuances of leadership requirements and backgrounds in the organisations that we partner to arrive at tailored programme content that’s relevant to the audience and culture to hand.
Within this uniqueness, a few of the approaches that we take include:

Leading people, managing results – this is a foundation leadership development programme that looks at some of the behavioural differences between management and leadership and then focuses on few core soft skills that will prove invaluable for the new leaders in business (usually secondary and tertiary layers of leadership)

Conscious leadership – this is a brilliant programme for leadership teams of organisations; it seeks to get under the skin of what really drives the senior executives in business teams so that higher levels of mutuality, respect and trust can be arrived at – once this is created, teams can really begin to fly

Anatomy of business leadership – think a mini MBA type programme in its construct, this is a case study / external speaker designed programme that seeks to round out business leaders beyond the soft skills required to lead teams of people into leading an organization / business with commercial aptitude

Leadership development programmes – these c. 6 month iterative learning programmes are built around the cultural foundation of the client in question; what is consistent though is our belief that successful leadership is authentic leadership. So we really help to raise levels of self awareness via profiling and feedback to give objective data to participants to sit alongside the subjective nature of much of the programme content. This balance allows us to fuse science with art, the reality of outstanding leadership.

Executive coaching – our panel of coaches at Wentworth people allows us to get up close and personal with senior leaders in business so that they know they have a confidante who will push and challenge them in private in ways that colleagues may not be able to because of course, the coach can see the wood from the trees and will not fear the consequences of a relationship breakdown at board level. This is a really successful way of complementing some of the other approaches mentioned above.

Regardless of the approach, we believe leadership is a day to day activity that never stops; the eyes of colleagues, business partners and shareholders alike are on us all of the time, so we have to have high levels of emotional intelligence (EQ) and emotional competency to be able to deal with the ever increasing demands that are placed on today’s leaders.

And above all else at Wentworth People, we believe that the more naturally you are yourself as a leader, the more you’ll enjoy it. And the more you enjoy it, the better at it you’ll be!