I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT RIGHT NOW

When is the best time to develop your leaders? To undertake leadership development? To build the essential capability that we know leaders need in all times, and particularly in times of challenge, turbulence, emergency, and change?

Here is what I am hearing:

• “I don’t have time for leadership development right now.”
• “We’re a bit busy, so maybe we’ll do it later.”
• “I’m not sure that development is a priority at the moment.”

If not now, when?

It should be clear that your people need to continue developing their skills. We need to upskill and reskill the majority of the workforce by 2030, so they can continue to contribute to the world of work. This includes leaders. Things are changing that quickly.

If you are not developing your people, then you risk your workforce being underprepared, not having relevant capability, and not able to contribute and perform at the level you need them to in the coming years. Your leaders need to be equipped to lead, and create the future.

When is it going to be the right time?

In my view, there is no perfect right time. Any time is the right time. All the time is the right time.

“

The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development.

~ John C Maxwell

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But let’s think about this in a slightly different way. Surely the leadership development you undertake is designed to elevate the capability and capacity of your leaders, otherwise you would not be doing it.

Let’s consider the positive impact that undertaking some leadership development, some learning, and implementation might have.

For example, you might want your leaders to participate in learning focused on productivity, organisation, and executive efficiency. Another focus might be learning in strategic thinking and planning, or decision-making or adding coaching skills to their leadership toolkit.

Now, each of these areas of learning, to name only a few, are going to create opportunities for your leaders to save time. They will gain back more than the time invested into the learning.

Let’s take a specific example. A one-day executive efficiency and effectiveness programme.

Now, out of a programme like this, I would anticipate that an individual has the potential to make many incremental time savings by applying what they learned. Here are a few simple time savings, though I would expect far more.

Time savings may include:

• A refreshed meeting schedule which means a leader save 15 minutes a day, by shortening a one-hour meeting to 45 minutes. Or taking a 90 minute meeting down to 75 minutes. Very achievable options.
• Streamlining email and message management, with more efficient batch processing and responsive action taking, rather than revisiting emails and messages many times. Consequently, they save another 15 minutes a day.
• More effective planning, reducing rework and time spent on busy work.

So with a few simple strategies from a single day of training, a leader can save at least 30 minutes a day.

I am going to assume an individual works a 37.5 hour week as a baseline. The time investment for a day of leadership development is 7.5 hours. From this day of leadership development an individual is now equipped to recover 30 minutes from their day, as shown above, they can now apply to other important things. The high-impact activities.

What if the leadership development was in a different area you ask. Would the opportunity to recover time still be there?

Let’s consider some examples:

• Development of leadership coaching skills. Developing coaching skills provides an opportunity to reduce time spent in interruptions, and long winded conversations, allowing leaders to recover time in their day.
• Developing more advanced communication skills and improving effective conversations, reduces back and forth conversations, misunderstandings and conflict…allowing leaders to recover time.
• Equally, development of more effective decision making, strategic thinking and planning, means focusing on the right things in the right way at the right time, creating opportunities to avoid busy work and to recover time.
• And there are so many more opportunities.

If we calculate 30 minutes each day (quite underestimated in my opinion), for five days a week, this means a two and a half hour time recovery in a week, that can be invested by a leader in the important.

Within three weeks, the leader can make back the time invested in 1 day of learning. 3 x 2.5 hours = 7.5 hours.

Now, I believe, there is likely to be a much greater opportunity for time recovery than this. The recovered time that can then be applied to high-impact value-adding activity by leaders.

However, let’s stick to my simplified example based on a daily recovered time of just 30 minutes. We have established that within three weeks an individual could comfortably recover the time invested for a single day of leadership development.

“

It takes leaders to grow other leaders.

~ Ray Blunt, Professor & Philosopher

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But it doesn’t stop there because what they have learned, they can apply every week of the year. Every year.

So assuming 4 weeks of annual holiday and 3 weeks of initial recovery time to get back square on the time ledger, they still have 45 weeks left in the year where they can continue to gain back 30 minutes a day.

This equates to 112.5 hours for the rest of the year.

Based on a 37.5 hour working week, this is equivalent to three working weeks of time.

• What could your leaders do with another three weeks a year?
• Where could they add more value for three weeks a year?

“We don’t have time for leadership development right now.”

I suggest you make time for leadership development.

Think bigger. Think more strategically. If you want to create the future, you need to build capability today.

I’d love to know your thoughts.