A Valuable and Original New Framework for Leadership and Leader Development
Learn how to grow toward your full potential and improve your leadership.
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Exceptional leaders lead themselves first. They take responsibility for their own growth and development, and do the necessary things to grow and improve. Exceptional leaders invest in others to help them develop their leadership and grow toward their full potential. Exceptional leaders can change the world.
In the previous two articles of this series, I introduced you to a comprehensive approach to leadership and leader development that is a stark contrast to the authoritarian and fear-based leadership practices that seem to dominate our organizations today and significantly improves and reimagines outdated leader development models still in use today. This time, I am going to reveal the framework and process that supports this approach by showing you what the pinnacle of human and leader development looks like, so you have a north star to strive toward and a guide that helps you achieve it.
Think about this: When you plan a project, you first define the end state and the tasks to achieve it, then you define the lines-of-effort, responsibilities, sequencing, scheduling, and coordinating instructions, and with these allocate the resources and establish any supporting policies, procedures, checklist, or guides. But have you ever seen this all laid out in any leadership book, article, or leader development program? It has been done, but not for a long time and an improved framework and process has been long overdue until now.
Whereas the approach I introduced you to last time provides a guiding philosophy to leadership and leader development centers on a leader’s character, motivations, and intensions—developing leaders who are morally grounded, people-centered, service-oriented, future-focused, and growth oriented—the framework provides the necessary structure for holistic leader development and provides a blueprint for you to build from. It serves as a continuum in that each level builds on the others in way that not only guides emerging leaders toward becoming senior leaders, but also helps them to identify gaps in their development and help them keep growing.
The framework has five levels and follows a process like building a house, as follows:
The first step is to prepare the groundwork: This means understanding three essential things upfront about leadership to guide our development. This includes understanding:
- what the pinnacle of leadership looks like, so we have a north star to strive toward, and with it have a guide to helping us achieve it;
- what leadership truly is, in contrast to management, which means understanding leadership’s full scope and magnitude in today’s leadership environment and not a bygone era; and
- the human aspect of leadership regarding human ability, motivation, character, and relationships. After all, leadership is both personal and relational. It reflects who we are and the factors that define us, which influences how we relate to and work with others.
Once we have prepared the groundwork, we can now lay the foundation—step two.
The foundation is all about you, the leader—about your holistic growth and development with the goal of becoming a transcendent human being striving to achieve your full human and leadership potential. It focuses on self-mastery and encompasses the strategies that facilitate self-leadership, self-directed learning, self-discipline and effective habits, and a healthy, enabling mindset.
Standing on a solid foundation, we can build the structure—step three. The structure provides four lines of effort that we must do to be effective in leading people, teams, and organizations.
The first of the four lines of effort, or pillars, is simply Leading the Way. This is about defining the end state and creating the vision, planning, communicating, directing, supervising, and modeling the way for others.
The second pillar is Cultivate Relationships and Build Community, which is about cultivating healthy, mutually beneficial relationships with and between people to build cohesion, foster communication and collaboration, and increase both collective and individual competence.
The third pillar is Motivate, Encourage, and Inspire. This focuses on the specific ways we can influence people to grow and excel to achieve their full human potential and perform at a higher level.
The fourth pillar is Equip, Enable, and Empower, which concentrates on setting the conditions for everyone’s success and entails:
- equipping people with knowledge, skills, direction, and standards;
- enabling people with the tools and resources needed to succeed and giving them the opportunity to grow and gain valuable experience; and
- empowering people and some degree of authority to make decisions and act on their own.
But just like building a house, structure needs support in terms of reinforcement and systems, like electricity, running water, and Internet connectivity, to make the structure work. So, the next step is establishing the systems and support, which entails creating the policies, procedures, systems, and other elements that enable success.
The last element of the framework is Completing the Apex. This is about strategic leadership and leading organizations, and concentrates on things like strategy, organizational design, and healthy, enabling culture, along with the strategic initiatives that translate strategy into action. I will unpack these further in later episodes.
The process works within the framework to create the enabling conditions for holistic human growth and leader development, which as I explained in the first episode of this series, are one and the same. This includes the strategies, practices, and methods to be successful at each level and ultimately achieve the pinnacle of leader development. Grounded in the broad fields of human development and adult learning, the process focuses on holistic transformational growth aimed at increasing human capacity and competence across the intellectual, emotional, moral, physical, and social domains. It also concentrates on developing an enabling mindset that facilitates transformational growth and improved performance.
The leadership lesson is this: An enabling mindset is growth oriented, goal-directed, open to new ideas and perspectives, and is outward (others) focused. It includes a well-informed worldview that represents an accurate perception of the world, a healthy, well-developed sense of self that recognizes our inherit worth and dignity, which gives us purpose, meaning, and direction. An enabling mindset leads us to constructive behaviors that help us grow and succeed, and fosters transcendent motivation that emphasizes putting others first and serving a higher purpose than ourselves.
Your second leadership lesson is this: An enabling mindset facilitates your holistic transformational growth requires four essential abilities:
- recognize that you do not know everything and that there is much more you can learn, especially from others (called intellectual humility);
- suspend judgement until all the facts are in;
- adjust your thinking based on new information (called transformational learning); and
- be able to check your biases and challenge your own beliefs and assumptions, which is a key aspect of metacognition.
So, here is your third and final leadership lesson: You need to take responsibility for your own growth and development and understand why rethinking your approach to leadership and leader development is important, and understand the what the pinnacle of leader development looks like—so you have a north star to strive for—and the framework and a process that guides you toward achieving it. Exceptional leaders never stop growing and trying to improve their leadership.
“Don’t just be a leader people want to follow, but also be a leader that makes a positive difference. Be a Difference Maker!