Future leaders often have a knack for a particular job, but need help learning how to support others. Execs need to know how to support empathy, conflict management, and more.
The organizational ladder is strange. Typically somebody shines in a particular department, notably enough that leadership identifies them as future leadership timber. In newsrooms, people who are really good at covering the police department can somehow be in line to become editor-in-chief. Are you really good at membership growth at an association? Perhaps you could be executive director!
That doesn’t track, of course—being good at a particular organizational task doesn’t mean a person has the capacity to lead the entire organization. That’s a point that executive coach Marcel Schwantes makes in a recent Inc. article: “One of the biggest misconceptions organizations have when determining future managers and leaders is that top technical performers, who were great individual contributors, will naturally become great leaders. In reality, the role of a leader requires a completely different skill set, especially when addressing interpersonal challenges.”
Schwantes notes that emerging leaders need more than just broader technical knowledge about how the organization functions; they need plenty of soft-skills training. For him, the key challenge is identifying the kinds of conflicts that can disrupt teams—battles over resources, ego, burnout, and more. “Leaders must be coached to recognize these triggers and proactively address conflicts before they escalate,” he writes. “This approach helps maintain a positive team dynamic and fosters a culture where employees feel empowered to navigate challenges constructively.”
A key challenge is identifying the kinds of conflicts that can disrupt teams—battles over resources, ego, burnout, and more.
But the ability to handle conflict isn’t the only skill future leaders need to be trained around. In a recent rundown of six essential leadership skills published last month at the Harvard Business Review, Rebecca Knight reports that the biggest challenges involve matters of empathy and adaptivity. Leadership positions can erode that capacity, which is why those soft skills are worth training around. “Research consistently shows that power reduces empathy and narrows focus,” she writes. “It’s not surprising then that as business leaders rise the corporate ladder, they often rely more on their own opinions and overlook others’ perspectives. But for effective management at any level, it’s essential to actively seek different perspectives and integrate new information into your approach.”
The advice Knight gathers from experts—emotional openness, adaptivity, flexibility, perspective, and self-awareness—are all hard to dispute. And I like the notion of what she calls “strategic disruption skills,” where leaders increase their capacity to test their teams. One of Knight’s sources, for instance, recommends using “the last 10 minutes of weekly meetings to ask everyone: What could we be doing better? This practice encourages team members to come prepared with suggestions.”
Which prompts me to make one suggestion when it comes to leadership development: Avoid getting into the habit of thinking that your future leaders have to be people who shine in one particular department. If so much effort is expended on training people around soft skills—and so much digital and literal ink is spilled promoting its importance—an organization would do well to identify the people who naturally demonstrate a capacity for empathy, conflict resolution, and so on. An understanding of the nuts and bolts of an entire organization is important. But that’s not all that “leadership timber” means.
The post How to Train Around Soft Skills appeared first on Associations Now.
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