Don’t Just Lead, Lead Boldly
Everything is about people. Life is all about the people we love, the people we support, and the people we serve.
Understanding and appreciating people is crucial. This is especially true of leaders – supervisors, managers, directors, and leaders of people at the highest levels across all organizations.
These leaders serve many critical roles for those they lead – teacher, mentor, coach, cheerleader, therapist, supporter, colleague, and career architect.
To do all of this consistently and successfully, people leaders must:
Meet multiple people where they are every day
Provide clear direction for work performance
Simultaneously lead multiple people in rhythm with the larger team and organization
Give thoughtful and timely feedback
Carefully design workloads based on individual capacity and organizational goals while developing people towards a career that could take them elsewhere
And they must successfully complete their own work at the same time. If that sounds hard, it is!
Leading people is hard. It requires a passionate interest in people and a specific set of skills and abilities – including the ability to manage many demands and responsibilities on a daily basis.
Now imagine how hard it is for a leader who is new or hasn’t been adequately or effectively trained for their leadership role. Too often, we see someone falling short in a leadership role and assume that person just isn’t equipped to be a leader, when in reality it’s that they have not been developed or trained to lead effectively by their organization.
The lack of intentional engagement or training for managers sets these leaders – and, just as importantly, those they lead – up to fail. Failure results in low morale, ineffective communication, unaddressed conflict and, ultimately, decreased retention. It also often leads to dissatisfied customers – no matter what industry or area your organization operates in. After all, the manager level is where your employee – and customer – experience starts. And where it can often end.
Put more simply, the reason new leaders don’t soar is because they’re too often forced to learn on the fly.
All of this is what inspired me to create Lead Boldly.
Lead Boldly is a longitudinal program for new and existing managers. It’s based on the idea that being intentional, collaborative and strategic goes a long way in helping organizations identify and develop new leaders – and in helping those leaders discover themselves along the way.
Lead Boldly works with program participants on 3 pillars:
Know Yourself
Know Your Team
Know Your Role
And while leadership development includes its fair share of universal truths, my experience has shown me that programs that are relevant and specific to participants are the most successful and impactful.
This is why Lead Boldly participants are engaged in the curriculum development process to ensure the material is directly relevant to their daily work. It’s why Lead Boldly is fully customizable for the organization in length, content, and facilitator selection. And it’s why we provide customized, affordable, and applied experiences for organizations of all sizes and industries.
This customized, adaptive approach helps ensure that Lead Boldly participants will walk away from the program knowing themselves, team, and role more clearly.
Whether your organization has true leadership-development resources internally or it doesn’t, our comprehensive project-management services mean we will design and administer the entire program – from discovery to implementation.
Leadership, like life, is about people. Empower your people – and help your leaders learn how to Lead Boldly.
Learn more about Lead Boldly here.