What Can You Do to Adapt and Grow Future Leaders?

Not every challenge is a prime opportunity to learn. Rather, research shows that certain kinds of challenges stimulate learning more than others. To adapt and grow future leaders, those with potential must be constantly seeking out new experiences and challenges that, by their very nature, foster learning. Tomorrows leaders can be challenged today to broaden their experience base.

Here are ten key challenges, which according to the Center for Creative Leadership, are designed specifically for developing new leaders:

1. Unfamiliar responsibilities. Encourage potential future leaders to handle responsibilities that are new or very different from previous ones they have handled. Potential assignments include the delegation of a management responsibility to the employee or working with colleagues to redesign a work process.

2. New directions. Future leaders should be encouraged to start something new or make strategic changes. Potential assignments include participating in the start-up of a new team or working on a strategic plan for a community or professional organization.

3. Inherited problems. Future leaders should not shy away from fixing problems created by someone else or existing before he or she took an assignment. Potential assignments include taking over a troubled project or serving on a task force to solve a major organizational problem.

4. Problems with employees. Dealing with employees who lack adequate experience, are incompetent or are resistant to change can be an excellent learning experience for future leaders. Potential assignments include coaching an employee with performance problems or resolving a conflict with a subordinate.

5. High stakes. Future leaders will benefit hugely from managing work with tight deadlines, pressure from above, high visibility and responsibility for critical decisions. Potential assignments include managing high-profile customers or business partners or assigning a tight-deadline assignment from your own boss.

6. Scope and scale. Future leaders should be encouraged to manage work that is broad in scope or large in size. Potential assignments include broadening the services or products offered by the employee's unit, serving on a team managing a large-scale project or serving as an officer in a regional or national professional association.

7. External pressure. Managing the interface with important groups outside the organization, such as customers, vendors, partners, unions and regulatory agencies can provide a future leader with invaluable experience. Potential assignments include training customers how to use a new product or taking calls on a customer hotline.

8. Influence without authority. A true future leader will be able to influence peers, higher management or other key people over whom he or she has no authority. Potential assignments include managing projects that require coordination across the organization or representing concerns of employees to higher management.

9. Work across cultures. Working with people from different cultures or with institutions in other countries is not only important for future leaders, but it is necessary. Potential assignments include managing a multi-country project, hosting vistors from other countries or just being required to travel abroad.

10. Work group diversity. Similar to working across cultures, future leaders should have the opportunity to be responsible for the work of people of both genders and different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Potential assignments include hiring and developing people of different genders, ethnic groups and races, leading a project team or task force with a diverse group of members or joining a community group that attracts a diverse group of people.

Reprinted with permission. © CCH