Rowitz On Leadership

Leaders tend to look for ways to develop and expand their leadership skills throughout their work lives. My last posting also stated that leaders tend to continue their leadership activities into their retirement years. Earlier, I also discussed the importance of journaling for leaders. The leader’s journal becomes an important tool for the leader in keeping up on personal reactions to events and readings that help guide the leader in future interactions with others. In this posting, we will explore another tool for leadership learning.

The individual leadership learning contract is a tool that many leaders use. The contract has the leader prepare a yearly learning plan to guide him/her each year. As these plans are developed, the leader may need to decide if an executive or life coach is needed to help the individual in the preparation of the plan and evaluation of progress in meeting the goals of the plan. Another consideration here is that the leadership learning plan needs to be seen as a contract in which the leader sees the plan as a set of obligations that guide the leader to become more effective.

Some of the questions that the plan needs to address are:

1. What are my key learning objectives for the next year?
2. What is my reading agenda and conference agenda for the next year?
3. What are my objectives for my agency over the next year?
4. Are there new collaborations that I want to initiate over the next year?
5. Pick 2-3 employees to mentor for the next year?

Now comes the important part. It is the actual writing part and the tendency to lose the plan in a file or some place on our desk. What I suggest is the beginning of a merger between our leadership plan and our leadership journal. The good place to record your personal leadership learning plan is in your journal. Your plan updates and plan progress can also be put in your journal. Thus your own leadership journey becomes a well documented series of events.