Developing leaders

Hello everybody. This is Gordon Curphy from Curphy Leadership Solutions, and the title of this talk is "Developing Leaders".

It's important to realize that people are not born to be leaders. We don't possess any sort of instinctual knowledge that tells us how to engage and develop employees, build teams, and achieve results. Those behaviors have got to be learned. How do people learn how to be a good leader?

It turns out there are many ways to learn about leadership. Right now, there are well over 10,000 books written about the topic of leadership, and I would venture to guess, probably 100,000 articles on the topic. There's certainly lots that had been written about leadership. You can attend an academic class. Many academic institutions have minors in leadership, have majors in leadership where you can get an advanced degree in leadership. There's a bevy of academic courses available to you to learn about leadership. You can watch leadership. You can see it in action. If you go to work every day, you can watch leaders. You can learn from them in terms of things that they do well, things they don't do so well. Incorporate that into your own set of behaviors. Many, many companies have formal leadership training programs. If you look at companies like Red Bull or Nike or Starbucks, any of those companies will have formal leadership training programs to help members or participants acquire the skills necessary to succeed in leadership positions. Lots of organizations such as Royal Dutch Shell, BP, American Express have formal coaching programs. They will hire internal or external coaches to help leaders be more effective in their roles. Some organizations have mentoring programs set up like Medtronic. There are organizations where we have mentors setup, and they work with people two or three levels in the organization to help them learn new things and help them master their careers and help them make the right choices in terms of where to spend their time and effort. Another good way to learn about leadership is just simply on-the-job experiences. There's oftentimes no better way to learn leadership than actually doing it, than actually trying to get people feedback and trying and get people motivated and trying to get people working together effectively to get things done.