As companies turn more agile, less hierarchical and more responsive to change, there are new demands on the people-front. There’s a need for people with strong business acumen and foundational leadership skills at all levels to harness and drive innovation. Leadership is not attributed to someone with a specific job title. It is a lived experience and is expressed in action. It must be ingrained in the organizational way of life. This new paradigm calls for a fundamental shift – from an ‘elitist’ to an ‘egalitarian approach,’ from ‘position and superiority’ to ‘leading-by-example.’
The changing leadership paradigm
On the face of it, leadership democratization is nothing but cascading leadership development further down into the organization in a cost-effective, scalable way. But this is easier said than done. To create the desired impact, HR and business leaders must focus on revamping the entire leadership development agenda.
Eighty-nine percent of executive survey respondents in a Deloitte survey rated “the need to strengthen, re-engineer, and improve organizational leadership” as an important priority. About 56% stated that their companies were not ready to meet leadership needs. This is even though organizations are spending more than ever on leadership development.
The problem lies in the fact that the majority of the efforts are focused on the limited number of senior executives. HR and business leaders must realize that front-line leaders currently influence over two-thirds of the workforce. And by 2025, these jobs will be held by millennials comprising 75% of the workforce. In this context, democratizing leadership is no longer a good-to-have, but a must-have.
How can HR democratize leadership?
The core values of leadership are transforming an ‘individualistic approach’ to ‘collective power.’ HR leaders must instill these values through effective people practices, policy, and communication.
Here’s what they can do for a start:
- Identify high potential employees early: Invest in the right people. The skills that make someone a high-performing individual contributor don’t always translate into good leadership skills. In fact, according to Gallup’s recent “State of the American Manager” report, companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for managing 82% of the time. Identifying potential leaders early-on is the first step.
- Define new leadership competencies: Leadership is as much about a mindset as it is about the experience. Changing mindsets may involve initiating a significant cultural transformation, i.e., embracing new values, new principles and new ways of working. Some of the new-age leadership competencies are an agile mindset, design thinking, virtual collaboration, cross-functional dexterity, team-orientation, new media literacy, analytical mindset, customer-centric orientation and so on.
- Provide the right resources: Provide high potentials with the right learning resources to help create a strong base of foundational knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Learning support must be personalized, flexible, and self-controlled by the learner. E-learning, MOOCs are a great way to democratize learning.
Scenario-based pedagogy sets a leadership development program apart. Find learning partners whose learning curriculum mirror everyday work scenarios. Learning models that are capable of examining the critical human-interaction in a team context help learners tie learning to ‘on-the-job’ behaviors.
- Revamp the leadership model: Doing all the above does not call for sustainable success unless they are brought together under the roof of a leadership model. Kickstart the leadership transformation based on the new realities of organizational success and devise a practical model that thrives on the concept of “leadership at all levels.”
- Communicate “collective” thought processes: The C-suite must propagate this new leadership ethos through active and frequent communication. Discuss the changing nature of work, teams, and leadership through clear and consistent communication campaigns; both in-person and virtual communication is essential.
In the end, democratizing leadership cannot be a one-time exercise. Key decision makers must look at building a cost-effective and scalable solution that works not only today but also in the long-term — one that churns out effective leaders year-on-year to yield the desired results. Democratizing leadership is possible only when organizations adopt an engaging, scenario-based and contextualized approach to leadership development.