Leadership insight: The forgotten leaders need your support!

When we look at leadership from a corporate viewpoint, generally we focus on the importance of building leadership capability at the executive level - and there is an abundance of statistics to tell us that great leadership drives better organisational performance. Now I don't disagree that a focus on executive-level leadership is critical; after all, the executives are the individuals charged with making the big decisions and setting the overall goals, strategy and direction of the organisation. However, over the last 20 years, one thing that continues to surprise me is how often we overlook or downplay the importance of building real leadership capability at the middle management level. After all, these are the people who are tasked with translating strategy from the theoretical to the actual.

Your middle managers have the opportunity to directly influence the attitudes, behaviours and performance of a vast number of your staff overall - those people who are busily executing your corporate vision, day in day out. Hence, effective middle managers are the key to unlocking significant performance potential from the vast majority of your workforce.

If you are like most companies, you probably build middle management skills by either running internal leadership development programs, use an external company to deliver, or maybe a combination of both. The programs might even be nationally accredited like the Certificate IV in Frontline or Retail Management.

Do they actually create a more effective mid management layer in your business? For those of you leveraging government funding to help pay for training, the first step towards "yes" is ensuring you are looking past the concept of "free training". I know this might sound obvious, but this complacency can prevent us looking deeper into whether our programs are actually valued by learners and improving the effectiveness of our middle managers.

In my experience, programs most likely to improve middle managers effectiveness begin with clear, positive and confident answers to the following: What behaviours are we trying to influence with our middle management development programs? How will these increase their performance and effectiveness in their leadership role? Do we know if these desired behavioural changes are actually occurring? Does senior management show a real interest in these programs, get involved in them in any way or hold the learners accountable for the implementation of their learning?

If you answered 'no' or 'I don't know', it's likely you have an issue. Without clearly defining the behaviours you are trying to change and measuring that change, how can you determine the real ROI of your program? Without senior manager involvement, how can you hope to drive an improvement of your middle management layer long term?

In short, you usually can't. To see a consistent improved performance from your people, learners need to implement their learning, senior managers need to be involved in the process to support this endeavour and the behavioural change needs to be measured. Here are a few tips on how to structure your programs to increase their effectiveness:

• Identify what behaviours you are actually targeting and how these will improve learner performance and effectiveness in their role
• Base session and course content around these behaviours and give learners simple tools to assist with application of learning. Assess learner performance based on evidence of application of this learning
• Use anonymous pre- and post-program reviews to measure the levels of behavioural change, ensuring you involve the learner themselves, their team and their boss. Where possible use the feedback to dynamically update and improve course content
• Get senior managers involved throughout the entire process from the pre- to post-program phases (needs analysis, guest speakers in sessions, coaches/mentors during/post-program and taking ownership and accountability for their people displaying the behavioural changes)

What are the rewards for your efforts?

• Higher performing, more effective middle managers who drive higher performance levels from their teams
• An objective measurement process that clearly identifies the ROI you are getting from
  your programs
• More buy-in from senior management to the programs. If you can show them a positive ROI, they'll want to be involved!

About the author

Leonie Curtis-Kempnich is Director - Training and Course Development at Leadership Success. For more information p: (02) 9089 8609f: (02) 9089 8677M: 0416210977e: leonie@lstraining.com.au w: www.lstraining.com.au

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