If you are an aspiring leader, consider leadership development consulting to plan your transition into leadership roles and career growth. One of the recommendations of leadership development consultants is to have a leadership development plan. Such a plan would be invaluable as it will become the primary guide to start your professional development. Secondly, it will help you develop a clear vision of leadership development goals and the timelines by which you should reach them.
Most organizations offer a variety of leadership skill-building courses as part of their learning and development initiatives. Young professionals should enroll in them to achieve professional development goals. The perfect course would be a custom leadership development program as it focuses on the skills that are specific needs of the organization.
Impact of custom leadership development programs
Leadership development consultants consider customized courses to be a two-step process -first, contextualizing the skill development, and second, personalizing the skill development process.
Contextualization ensures that the skills are practiced per the organizational strategies and culture. Contextualization can be further divided into strategic and cultural contextualization. In strategic contextualization, the content and the outcome are matched with the long-term intents of the organization – challenges are identified, and skills to overcome them are practiced per a competency model. In cultural contextualization, the language is aligned with the norms of the organization. It encourages skilled instructors to help managers to evaluate the norms’ impact.
Personalization is when learners explore the content from their psychological perspectives, socio-economic background, and aspirations. Personalization includes two components- role personalization and career personalization. In role personalization, the learning experience is examined in the context of their current role. Employees find fresh ways to manage their roles, gain competence and understand their roles better. Career personalization allows learners to reflect on leadership roles’ psychological and social impact.
Contextualization is critical to achieving organizational goals. Personalization gives solutions to questions and needs of the individual. The problem with customized leadership development programs is often the trade-off between contextualization and personalization. For example, an organization may seek a customized entrepreneurial leadership development program for managers to learn from internal case studies. However, managers’ expectation of the course is personalized learning. The ability to use tools, data analysis, automation processes, and support for optimizing their leadership capabilities.
The impact of customized leadership development programs is in their ability to contextualize and personalize the content by putting the learners in the position of leaders. Contextualization allows managers to resolve issues with organizational norms, skills needed, and expectations of the leaders.
A customized leadership development program allows learners to explore the skills and capabilities needed by placing themselves in the position of leaders. It gives them clarity about the roles and responsibilities they only possess after completing the learning program. Hence learning becomes an immersive experience. Managers develop the ability to expand their networks and create personal goals and team goals. There is an exemplary integration of personal achievements with strategic goals, giving them a fresh perspective on organizational growth.
Wrapping Up
Leadership skills in managerial roles expect to encourage teams to understand the norms of the organization and realign their skills to achieve a new set of goals. For early career aspirants, custom leadership development programs create opportunities for a seamless transition into management roles in the organization. The impact of contextualized and personalized learning is the genesis of capable, skilled, well-trained managers in leadership roles.
To know more about custom leadership development programs and leadership development consulting, speak to our team of experts at Infopro Learning now!
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