Leadership development has a lot to do with experience, but that has its limitations – especially if you’re in the early stages of your career and experience is a smaller piece of your “leadership pie chart.” So how do you beef up your leadership capabilities beyond your own experience?

The answer is to supplement your own experience with what you can learn from the experiences of others. One way to do this is to read books about great leaders, the challenges they faced, the relationships they forged and the processes they followed to come to decisions and carry them out. This approach was explored in more depth in a GBlog entry last June entitled “Expanding Your Leadership Reading.”

For a moment, however, let’s consider another less time-consuming way to learn through the experience of others. I’m talking about reading interviews that are posted on the internet by such reputable sources such as HBR, The NY Times and The Financial Times. These interviews are a quick read and provide interesting perspectives on leadership from those who are recognized as highly credible leaders today.

A prime example of one such interview was posted on December 12 by The NY Times. It’s an interview with the C.E.O. and Chairwoman of the executive board of Wolters Kluwer, Nancy McKinstry. Her resume is impressive and her experiences have brought her to some interesting conclusions about leadership. Here are a few of the insights she’s gleaned through her experience as a leader:

•  “…you could produce better results if you knew where you were headed and what somebody wanted.”
• Management style must align with the types of communication and work styles that are prevalent in the countries to which your teams belong.
• Results matter; you must prove that you can drive something forward.
• You can’t motivate unless you set a direction for the business, create a plan, and really allow people the opportunity to get engaged around that.
• Problem-solving and successfully dealing with adversity are key attributes to look for in potential leaders and especially those who you may hire.
• Good leaders think on their feet.

What’s wonderful about these interviews is that you also get a glimpse of the circumstances within which these insights take form. Understanding the context makes you realize that the insights are not platitudes; they are information about what really works. And if you somehow take this information and translate it into what you do as a leader, you may find that you’re increasing your percentage of experience on the “leadership pie chart” at a faster rate.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 8:46 pm and is filed under Leadership Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.