“Creating the Future Begins with Cultivating the Leaders of Tomorrow”

To be successful, tomorrow’s leaders must master a wide array of competencies and skills. They need to:

• Develop managerial effectiveness together with emotional intelligence
• Understand their business and have deep insight into the dynamics of the culture in the workplace
• Generate stability, focus, and clarity amid change and complex situations
• Cultivate professional development in harmony with personal growth
• Be a source of inspiration to energize commitment and innovation

On Developing Leaders

A Leadership Development Insight

The greatest leadership act in the world is growing and developing leaders, and then empowering and releasing them to lead.

Leadership development and the management training field have seen many formulas: “the 5 steps…;” “the six ways…;” “the seven, the nine and the twelve of something else.” All these frameworks are good, and they all carry wisdom and powerful teaching, but they have shortcomings: all maps are only an extrapolation of reality, and they make one-size-fits-all formulaic and prescriptive propositions.

True, we all have maps in our minds. Even when you say “I don’t have a map,” it only means you don’t have a clear map, you’re not aware of your map, or your map isn’t working or is confusing. True development includes downloading new maps. It is a great learning experience. What then is the problem or danger with maps?

The danger is forcing the map onto the landscape. That is what I did one night when I learned to navigate. I had made a thorough study of the topographic map. I memorized how many steps I’d have to count to the first fork, to then go around the first and second hill and climb the third hill that would appear on my left. It was all in the detailed topographic map.

It was a summer evening and off we went, each leaving for his solo navigation. In the beginning it all looked clear. But then something happened. The turn I was looking for in between two hills did not look exactly how I expected it to look from my study of the map. But then I looked at it again and found a way to justify the landscape, and of course got lost. It’s called forcing the map onto the landscape.

We do this all the time. We fight situations by trying to coerce onto them our mental map, and it brings us grief and distress. I had to trace back to the point where I started, by which time it was nearly morning. But first I had to let go of the fixation of forcing the map onto the ground.

As a leader, maps can help you a lot, but you need something even more important than maps—You need your own compass. You need to know yourself and have the capacity to enter an unknown terrain that has not been mapped, where you draw the map as you walk the terrain. This is the nature of leadership. You find a path forward in a place you have not travelled before. “To lead is to take the next step, to go where you have never gone, to open a way forward into the unknown and the uncharted.”

The best and most impactful leadership development programs help leaders:

1. Find and calibrate their own compass
2. Develop a sense of vision and direction
3. Offer tools to help draw the map while walking the terrain

In our leadership development summits and retreats we take the view that you are unique. Your strengths and success formulas are unique. While all formulas and maps carry helpful teachings, the greater reward is in discovering yourself. You get to understand your values, areas of passion, personal capabilities and inclinations and your way of creating and achieving success. Successful leaders first lead themselves.

The greatest leadership programs are those that help you lead yourself and then help you get on the path of developing leaders around you. Our Leadership Journey does exactly this.