Danger: Beware of Random, Unfocused Leadership Development – Insight from Ron Holifield’s 4th Dimension Leadership
An employee is told what to do and how to do it. A Supervisor is told what to do. A Manager is told what to accomplish. A Systems Leader (typically a department head or above) is responsible for designing, implementing, and overseeing systems which ensure organizational goals are being achieved. This work is frequently done across various organizational lines and silos.
Ron Holifield, 4TH DIMENSION LEADERSHIP: A Radical Strategy for Creating an Authentic Servant Leadership Culture
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The examples are too numerous to mention. A person is good at his/her job, and is promoted to the next level up. But, the next level up requires a set of interpersonal, relational, interactive skills that this person does not have. And so, you lose a good ___________ (whatever the skill-determined job was), and you don’t end up with a good leader in the new position.
In 4th Dimension Leadership, the new book by Ron Holifield, CEO of Strategic Government Resources, you will find a comprehensive guide to fixing this problem.
His recommendation is a tightly focused set of cascading leadership principles, thoroughly trained, in a set sequence. From the book:
Leadership development in OWCH organizations is random, unfocused, and unproductive because it fails to understand the basic building blocks of both leadership and education.
(Note: OWCH = Old World, Change Hesitant. Pretty good description of many organizations, don’t you think?).
So, to avoid putting unprepared and not-all-that-good-at folks in a job that requires leading others, you build, and follow, a comprehensive program of training. In the book, he describes the four leadership dimensions that provide the sequence in this training:
Relational Leadership
Operational Leadership
Systems Leadership
Strategic Leadership
But, underlying all throughout his book is this simple and inescapable truth: the right kind of leadership will not evolve on its own. Building the right kind of leadership development has a much better chance of producing the kind of leadership that will succeed in the long run.
In the meantime, as Ron Holifield says, The system you have created is perfectly designed to produce the results you are getting. So if you need different results, it’s probably time to put in a much better system!
