TABLE OF CONTENTS Leadership requires self-examination. Many people have never thought of themselves as leaders and don t really know what that means. Some think that being a good manager of tasks is leadership. It is critical to use an assessment at the beginning of your leadership sessions so that people begin to understand their own strengths and weaknesses.
It is important to emphasize here that this leadership workshop is about leveraging personal strengths, not about turning everyone into a clone of the perfect leader. There is no one person who exhibits outstanding performance in all 10 of the leadership competencies we will explore here. Leadership effectiveness depends on the leader, the people being led and the business context. The most important leadership competencies will differ with the situation.
These assessments can be threatening but, as the facilitator, you must continue to encourage people to approach them as a way to identify strengths. Learners will tend to focus exclusively on their weaknesses, which is natural, but this can hamper leadership development. All people need to understand the areas in which they excel and then find ways to build relationships, processes, or structures that will allow them to fill in the gaps in their performance.
Certainly there are minimum levels for all the competencies. A great leader may not be the most gifted communicator, but he or she does have to be able to communicate at the level defined by the business need. The workshops are designed to provide tools for improving competencies that...
