Leadership is a skill learned through training and experience. Learn how to build an effective leadership program inside your organization.
Leadership is the most important thing. Of all the humbling lessons we learned on the battlefield, the greatest lesson we brought back with us is that leadership is the critical factor in whether or not a team succeeds or fails. The first step in understanding how to create a successful leadership development program is to recognize just how important leadership is to the success of any team. By leadership, we don’t just mean just the most senior people at the top of an organization. We mean leaders at every level of the team: the mid-level managers, the front-line leaders, right down to front-line troopers—the individual contributors who aren’t in charge of anybody else but themselves and their piece of the mission. Those individuals led—they built relationships, leveraged resources, took ownership of problems, and implemented solutions to get those problems solved. And that leadership at every level made all the difference. It’s the same thing for any organization, any company, any team, in any business or industry. When every member of the team sees themselves as a leader and moves the team forward in a positive direction to accomplish that organization’s strategic goals, that is the greatest determining factor in whether that team succeeds or fails.
Understanding this fundamental truth, then it becomes imperative that organizations invest in a leadership development program dedicated to helping their leaders at every level learn, grow and improve. The question many leaders ask is this: how to create a leadership development program?
Leadership is a skill. And like any skill, none of us are born with it. Just as with other skills, like riding a bicycle, playing a sport, or learning a musical instrument, these skills must be learned through training and actual experience. Organizations that recognize the power of leadership and invest in developing their leaders gain a significant advantage over their competition. Leadership development doesn’t just happen on its own. It requires a dedicated and disciplined effort to create an effective leadership development program.
In seeking answers on how to create a successful leadership development program, there are some basic guidelines that every leadership training program should follow.
Every effective leadership development program must include these three foundations: 1) it must be realistic, 2) it must focus on the fundamentals, and 3) it must be repetitive.
Realistic. The first step in understanding how to create a leadership development program is to make training realistic. An effective leadership training program must prepare participants for the realistic challenges they will face in the real world. What are the actual challenges that your team regularly encounters or might encounter? Are they ready for the worst-case scenario? This is theory versus reality. Don’t train for the easy scenario where nothing goes wrong. In the real world, things rarely go according to plan. Resources are scarce. Communications and plans are misunderstood. Logistics and supply chain issues happen. Customers lose their temper. Frictions develop between two departments or divisions that should be supporting each other. Use case studies and role-play scenarios to help people learn to deal with these problems Try to create scenarios or environments that mimic the conditions, challenges, uncertainty, and chaos that your team must navigate. There is no growth in the comfort zone. Training should provide a challenge so that people begin to feel more comfortable and confident where they might have lacked confidence previously. This enables leaders at every level to grow and improve their leadership skills. Making training realistic is crucial to learning how to create a successful leadership development program.
Fundamentals. An effective leadership development program must focus on the basics. Sometimes, people want to skip over the basics and move on to “advanced tactics.” But advanced tactics are simply doing to basics well. And doing the basics well is really hard. Therefore, in learning how to create a leadership development program, one must focus the training to ensure leaders at every level are proficient in the basic fundamentals of leadership. That starts with Extreme Ownership. The foundation for effective leadership is Extreme Ownership, which simply means that there are no excuses. There is no one else to blame. You must own everything in your world, and not just what you are responsible for but everything that impacts your mission. This is a simple concept in theory, but it is extremely difficult to implement in reality. Why? Because our ego wants to deflect blame for mistakes and failures and point the finger any anyone or anything other than ourselves. As long as people blame others or circumstances, make excuses, and insist it wasn’t their fault, no one actually steps up and solves the problems, and those problems will persist. Not only do most problems not go away on their own, the problems usually get worse. So knowing how to create a successful leadership development program starts with a foundation of Extreme Ownership. Next, every effective leadership program must instill four fundamental principles into the culture of their organization that we call the Laws of Combat Leadership: 1) Cover and Move or teamwork; 2) Simple; 3) Prioritize and Execute; and 4) Decentralized Command. Any time that we see a team that is struggling to perform, it is because they are violating one or more of these four Laws of Combat Leadership: they aren’t mutually supporting one another and working as a team toward the overarching goal, they don’t understand what the goal is they are working toward, they are focused on the wrong things are trying to take on two many things at once, or they are waiting for someone higher in the chain of command to make a decision and solve their problems. This doesn’t work. Every team must learn and understand these basic principles in order to be effective, accomplish their mission, and win. This is integral to understanding how to create a leadership development program.
Repetitive. There is no inoculation for leadership training. A leadership development program is not a one-time training event. You can’t just read a leadership article like this one and expect to be prepared for every leadership scenario. You can’t just read or listen to a book about leadership development like Extreme Ownership or its sequel, the Dichotomy of Leadership one time, sit through a few hours of a leadership workshop like the ones we run at Echelon Front, or take a single online leadership course and assume you’ve mastered leadership. Neither can you attend a few days of onboarding training when you first join a company or organization and expect your leadership skills to be proficient for the long-term. A good leadership development program must be a training continuum. Leadership training must be repetitive. Because leadership is a skill, like any other skill, you must continually work to improve your leadership skills or those skills atrophy. Growing your leadership skills is an ongoing process. Recognizing how to create a successful leadership development program is to recognize the need for frequent and continuous training. That is key to building better leaders in your organization and making leadership development a part of your team’s culture. A leadership training continuum that constantly challenges leaders at every level to think about leadership, grow, and improve, will ensure they have the effective leadership skills to solve problems and win.
NOW YOU HAVE A BASIC UNDERSTANDING OF HOW TO CREATE A LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
However, even with the knowledge that leadership is the critical factor in the success or failure of your team and understanding that every leadership development program should be realistic, repetitive, and focus on the fundamentals, we know it can still be a daunting task to create such a program from scratch. That’s why, at Echelon Front, we have a team of highly experienced leadership instructors who assess your organization’s needs and then custom-design and build a leadership development program for your company, team, or organization’s specific leadership challenges. We call this our Leadership Development and Alignment Program or LDAP. The goal of these programs is to establish a foundation of Extreme Ownership in the culture of your organization, where instead of pointing fingers or making excuses, your team takes ownership of problems and gets them solved. The LDAP ensures alignment across the organization, breaking down silos between teams, departments, and divisions, as well as making sure that everyone from the frontline individual contributors to the senior executive team understands and is aligned on the strategic priorities. The goal of this program is to make continuous leadership development a part of the culture of your organization. Our Leadership Development and Alignment Program instructors understand how to create a successful leadership development program. Our LDAP team has worked with hundreds of companies across a vast array of industries to accomplish their mission and win. Here is a case study example that provides more information about Echelon Front’s Leadership Development and Alignment Programs.
Knowledge means nothing if you don’t take action to improve your leadership skills. Knowing how to create a successful leadership development program doesn’t help you if you don’t take action. You can’t become a great leader or make the leaders on your team better just by reading an article, sitting through a workshop, or reading a single book. It takes consistent on a daily or weekly effort. You have to do the work.
Consistent daily discipline is the path to victory. Extreme Ownership is the guide down that path. If you find yourself reading this article, you are not alone.
At Echelon Front, we’ve helped thousands of men and women just like you. If you’re tired of being frustrated that the people in your organization aren’t better leaders, then it’s time to do something about it.
Here’s what I want you to do now: Click this link and visit Extreme Ownership Academy, our online resource for leadership development for people just like you who want to learn how to be better leaders and build more effective leadership development programs for their leaders.
Leif Babin
Leif Babin, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer, President and co-founder of Echelon Front LLC, a premier leadership consulting and training company, and co-author, alongside Jocko Willink, of the New York Times best-selling books, Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALS Lead and Win, and the Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win. Echelon Front teaches the principles of Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership to helps leaders learn to build, train and lead their own high-performance teams to accomplish the mission and win.
