Prioritizing Development

Guided Discovery.

Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash

Suggested Reading

• ADP 6-22, Army Leadership and the Profession

  • Pages 6-1 through 7-4 based on printed document (PDF pages 79-98)

  • Reviewing the US Army’s five competencies for developing and achieving: prepares self, creates a positive environment, develops others, stewards the profession, and gets results

• Link to ADP 6-22 on the US Army Publishing Directorate

• This week’s Study: Train Your Replacement

• All excerpts below are from ADP 6-22 unless otherwise noted

Introduction

6-2. Leaders develop their own leadership proficiency through deliberate study, feedback, and practice. Fundamentally, leadership develops when an individual desires to improve and invests effort, their superior supports development, and the organizational climate values learning. Learning to be a leader requires knowledge of leadership, experience using this knowledge, and feedback from one’s seniors, peers, and subordinates. It also requires opportunities to practice leading others as often as possible. Formal systems such as evaluation reports, academic evaluation reports, and 360 assessments offer learning opportunities, but the individual must embrace the opportunity and internalize the information. The fastest learning occurs when multiple challenging and interesting opportunities to practice leadership with meaningful and honest feedback are present. These elements contribute to self-development, developing others, and setting a climate conducive to learning.

6-3. Leader development of others involves recruiting, accessing, developing, assigning, promoting, and retaining the leaders with the potential for levels of greater responsibility. Leaders develop subordinates when they prepare and then challenge them with greater responsibility, authority, and accountability. It is the individual professional responsibility of all leaders to develop their subordinates as leaders.

6-5. Committed leaders continuously improve their organization, leaving it better than they found it. They expect other leaders to do the same. Leaders look ahead and prepare subordinates with potential to assume positions with greater leadership responsibility; in turn, subordinates develop themselves to prepare for future leadership assignments. Leaders ensure subordinates know that those who are best prepared for increased responsibility are those they are most likely to select for higher leadership positions.

How do you develop people?
How do you prioritize developing skills that do not yet exist in your industry?
Do your development priorities reflect your deepest values or your greatest fears?

This Week’s Reading, Abridged

6-9. Successful self-development concentrates on the key attributes of the leader: character, presence, and intellect. … Leaders must exploit every available opportunity to sharpen their intellectual capacity and relevant knowledge. A developed intellect enables the leader to think creatively and reason analytically, critically, ethically, and with cultural sensitivity.

6-12. Leaders read about, write about, and practice their profession. They prepare themselves for leadership positions through lifelong learning and broadening experiences relevant to their career paths. Lifelong learning involves study to acquire new knowledge, reflection, and understanding about how to apply it when needed. Broadening consists of those education and training opportunities, assignments, and experiences that provide exposure outside the leader’s narrow branch or functional area competencies. Broadening should be complementary to a leader’s experience, and should provide wider perspectives that prepare the leader for greater levels of responsibility.

6-15. Leaders develop self-awareness though self-critique and self-regulation. Self-aware leaders are open to feedback from others and actively seek it. They possess the humility to ask themselves hard questions about their performance, decisions, and judgment. They are serious about examining their own behavior to determine how to be a better, more effective leader. Self-aware leaders are reflective, hold themselves to higher standards than their subordinates, and look to themselves first when subordinates are unsuccessful.

6-16. Self-aware leaders understand they are a component of a larger organization that demands both adaptability and humility. They understand the importance of flexibility because conditions continuously change. They also understand that the focus is on the mission, not them.