Foreword: You’ll see Lead On articles about leadership development from time to time. Leadership development helps us build resilience and grit, and it applies to all of us – whether we have an executive or management position at work or not.
What’s leadership development?
It covers a lot of territory. One part involves deeply examining how we prefer to interact with ourselves and others. Another part is understanding how others interpret our actions, and then we compare that with what we intended. (There’s usually a gap.)
I know, I know. It’s a lot. And there are more parts to it.
We do that kind of development to become better leaders. And better people.
Leadership development has been an important part of what leaders do for several decades. It has improved how we communicate with others and build trust, how we handle stress, and so much more. It also reminds me of something from several decades ago.
In the late 1960s, my sister’s college boyfriend, Reed, drove his forest green Volkswagen Beetle over 400 miles to our home in Memphis, Tennessee, to visit her during summer break. Memphis is hot in the summer. Hot and dusty and hot and flat and humid and hot.
It was an early, vivid memory for me. Perhaps because Reed wore driving gloves to steer the car down the I-40. Leather driving gloves, medium-brown, holes and grip material, kind of dashing.
Driving gloves. Worn while driving. Worn the entire time you drive.
Hyper-brief history of driving gloves:
• Early automobiles (think 1910) were open-air, which meant open-mud, open-dirt, open-everything.
• These early cars had no heating systems for drivers and passengers.
• Even by the 1950s or so, heating wasn’t standard – it was add-on.
• Many steering wheels weren’t made of grip-worthy material.
• Hands needed protection and warmth. Hands needed the ability to grip steering wheels.
• Enter the practical and oft-fashionable driving gloves.
We had to have those driving gloves. They served various purposes. And then they were gone.
In decades past, driving gloves were everywhere. That’s why many of us still call that particular place, in front of the passenger side of the car, the “glove compartment” or “glove box.”
Let’s shift gears. (Sorry, couldn’t help it.) Why do we have leadership development in the workplace today? This is super short, but it covers the high points:
• Early corporate environments relied heavily on OJT: on-the-job training.
• OJT’s purpose was teaching technical skills – how-to’s for equipment, materials, etc.
• Even by the 1960s or so, “management training programs” weren’t standard curricula; in some progressive companies, they were add-on’s.
• Most companies didn’t believe leadership could be taught.
• Then the workplace became more gender- and culture-diverse, market forces shifted due to decentralization, global economies, and more, and outdated leadership styles didn’t work.
• Enter the era of leadership development and changing the organizational culture.
We didn’t think we needed leadership development, and then we did. The shift took decades, and now most organizations embrace it.
If you’re like most, you still struggle with conflict, understanding others and yourself, and motivation. To name a few.
Keep improving and sharpening the saw, as Stephen Covey called one aspect of effectiveness. Keep working on having high-quality conversations with others. Be aware of how your style – how you are – affects others. And persist to encourage and coach others to improve their leadership brand, too.
Because here’s what we want: The day when today’s best leadership development advice looks like a pair of fine antique driving gloves. Beautiful, essential in its time, well-made and effective. And unneeded, obsolete because so many positive improvements will be default behavior in the future.
When default means we stop our sarcastic impulse before we dis someone, when we initiate honest debriefing after things don’t go well, when we act assertively rather than aggressively. When these ways of interacting are habit. That’ll be a day to remember the driving gloves and smile.
Lead On.
“When will we make the same breakthroughs in the way we treat each other as we have made in technology?”
– Theodore Zeldin, Philosopher, early 2000s
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