Seven ways to identify leadership gaps and tips to overcome it

The first thing you need to do is identify the leadership gap in your organization. This can be done in the following ways:

1. Hold one-on-one meetings with consultants

Quite often it has been seen that people are able to see issues before their leaders. However, people may not always be ready to share what they see in that regard.

A strategy that you can use in this case is to get people from outside to talk to your company leaders. People normally are more comfortable to share their ideas and thoughts with people who are not directly related to the organisation they are working for.

The amount of information that comes through these sessions are amazing, to say the least.

2. Use assessment tools

If you wish to identify any potential leadership gap in your organisation, assessment tools can be helpful.

In fact, the market is full of assessment tools that can be used by leaders, teams, and people so that they can see gaps in leadership.

However, as far as the impact made by these tools is concerned, it is very important that you leverage and understand the results of such assessment.

Also Read: How Singapore’s employers can overcome talent shortages and skill gaps

3. Ask employees anonymously and act on their feedback

In order to discover the leadership gap in your company, you can organize engagement surveys where employees remain anonymous and provide feedback on critical issues.

You can also employ focus groups that measure how healthy your organisation is.

These are some accurate ways of knowing about areas where leadership is strong and lacking.

In this case, you need to make sure that you are getting specific examples for each of them.

4. Decide what you want to be as a company

This is a critical area for identifying leadership gap in your organization.

You need to have a clear idea of how you vision to be as an organisation. If you are not clear about the vision of what you wish to be in the future you will never know what is needed from your employees to reach the desired state.

For this, you need to honestly assess where you are right now in your business.

5. Create regular leadership pit stops

Quite often it has been seen that leaders keep going till they cannot do so anymore. This is a major leadership gap.

Just as race cars, leaders need to make pit stops on a regular basis. It goes without saying that these pit stops have to be strategic as well.

They should focus on areas like what you need to start doing, what you have to stop doing, what you have to keep doing, and what you have to change.

6. Discover gaps between current and ideal leadership

When it comes to identifying a leadership gap in your organization this is an important step.

Quite often it has been seen that companies are content with the kind of leadership that they have, rather than looking for leaders that would be ideal for them.

You need mentors rather than managers. You need to decide whether you would want to reward relationship builders or task managers.

You as a leader should inspire action rather than seek productivity. For this, you need to begin tough conversations.

Also Read: Filling the leadership gap: Why you cannot delegate responsibility

7. Invest in leadership coaching

If you wish to do away with leadership gap in your organisation you need to organise leadership coaching for your valued contributors as well as rising stars.

If you simply leave them to learn leadership without any proper guidance or support it would be highly unfair, to say the least.

In fact, it will be like asking athletes to take part in the Olympics without training and support to back them up.

A lot of companies make the mistake of using these resources for under performers.

Conclusion

It is essential to have a culture of feedback in your organisation in order to make sure that there is no leadership gap.

At the very least this will make sure that you are able to identify the problem in time. This way, it will be easier to plan in a way where you can attain the kind of success that you are after.

–

Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Join our e27 Telegram group here, or our e27 contributor Facebook page here.

Image Credit: Amy Hirschi

 

The post Identifying leadership gaps in your organisation appeared first on e27.