Leadership is the ability to guide and empower a group toward achieving a key organizational goal. Being successful requires judgment, decision-making, and responsibility while inspiring teamwork, trust, and motivation. Emerging leaders need to learn these skills.

Skills vs. Concepts

Recognizing the need for productive teams, many organizations have created programs to introduce emerging leaders to fundamental leadership concepts and principles. Even many business schools are now offering courses in leadership.

Traditionally, instructors share basic concepts and principles with emerging leaders and assume that learners will understand them, remember them, and apply them on the job.

The problem: knowing what to do isn’t the same as being able to do it. Concepts and principles, as important as they are, are not the same as skills.

Practice: The Key to Skill Mastery

Simulated classroom exercises can be great introductions to new skills, but they are inadequate for actually establishing the skills. Skill mastery requires repeated application in real-world situations, which can’t happen in the classroom. Over time, many repetitions of a behavior stimulate the brain cells involved in the skill to connect with each other. This impact on the brain causes a circuit of interconnected brain cells to form that enables the behavior to become an automatic response.

Because of this need for repetition, mastering leadership skills is like acquiring the skills needed for competitive sports. For example, it takes extraordinary skill for a player to hit a baseball rocketing towards him at 90 miles per hour. The batter has no time to analyze the pitch and think about the best way to make effective contact with the ball. The necessary skills have to be automatic, established during months of practice.

In exactly the same way, leaders often have little time to think about the best way to react. They need to have invested a lot of time using the skills at work to engage with people effectively.

Coaching Encourages Emerging Leaders

Because the path towards mastery inevitably includes many such frustrations, coaching is a vital ingredient for replacing old habits. Coaching helps an emerging leader to be held accountable, to be asked about what was learned from failures, and to receive encouragement.

In short, instruction can impart knowledge, but skill-building requires a dedicated, long-term follow-up. Coaching is important to develop leaders at all levels, so an economical solution is for the leaders to coach each other. With this kind of peer support, emerging leaders are more likely to continue doing the work that leads to mastery.

The ideal leadership development program, then, not only offers excellent introductions to the best practices, but it also supports what needs to happen afterwards: a long-term program of on-the-job application to establish essential skills involved in interpersonal communication and character strength. As leaders practice the most effective ways of connecting with members of their team, they create effective action while nurturing leader-team relationships.

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