Leadership Training: Planning, Organizing, Staffing & Control

Introduction

The leader is interested in aligning the beliefs and values of people with the overall goals and vision of the organization. In the leadership role, one can bring about change by providing direction, by setting an example, by motivating through inspiration, and by building teams based on respect and trust. A leader is focused on results rather than methods, systems, and procedures. Leaders ask themselves, "For what purpose?" and "What are the consequences for the system as a whole?" (Chait, 1997)

Different organizations offer various leadership development training programs for developing leadership skills in relation to planning, organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling. The following paper analyzes the subject matter of these leadership training programs from various training writings and programs, in the light of the aforementioned human resource and management functions within an organization.

Planning

Planning is concerned with the future impact of today's decisions. It is the fundamental function of leadership training for effective management, from which the organizing, staffing, leading, and controlling functions stem. The manager is ready to lead, organize, and staff only after goals and plans to reach those goals are in place. Likewise, the leading function — influencing the behavior of people in the organization — depends on the goals to be achieved. Finally, in the controlling function, the determination of whether or not goals are being accomplished and standards met is based on the planning function. The planning function provides the goals and standards that drive the controlling function (Gumport, 1998).

The basic planning terminology order followed in leadership training, from general to specific, is: vision — mission — objectives — goals. Leadership training is provided within the following perspectives:

Vision is the nonspecific, directional, and motivational guidance for the entire organization. Top managers normally provide a vision for the business. It is the most emotional of the four levels in the hierarchy of purposes; hence it requires extensive leadership capabilities and training to become the top manager who makes decisions on organizational vision.

The mission contains an organization's reason for being. It is concerned with the scope of the business and what distinguishes it from similar businesses. Mission reflects the culture and values of top management. If leaders are trained to frame it with the task-oriented approach of a manager, it may prove detrimental to employees. For this reason, a leadership insight is necessary to adopt values and culture within the mission that are beneficial to employees. This ability is developed within the attitudes of leaders under training through individual case analyses, where they are made to frame, scrutinize, and implement mission statements on different models.

Objectives refine the mission and address key issues within the organization such as market standing, innovation, productivity, physical and financial resources, profitability, and management. Leaders are trained to adopt general, observable, challenging, and open-ended objectives, as they should be. By definition, objectives would be unrealistic if not structured with respect to worker performance and efficiency, motivating factors, and company loyalty. Leaders are trained to structure them with regard to these influencing factors.

Goals are specific statements of anticipated results that further define the organization's objectives. They are expected to be specific, measurable, attainable, rewarding, and time-bound. Ignoring how workers would be led to the accomplishment of these goals — and keeping focus only on reaching them — is impractical for an organization with professional management. Leaders are trained to understand that the achievement of a company's goals, without motivating leadership that values what workers value, is not possible.

Organizing is establishing the internal organizational structure of the business. The focus of leadership training in this subject is on the division, coordination, and control of tasks and the flow of information within the organization. Leaders are trained to be managers who distribute responsibility and authority to jobholders in this function of management.

Organizing

Leadership training makes it essential that the manager possess leadership attributes for organizing. From the task-oriented approach, a manager may organize a business structure, but cannot successfully maintain it without a leader's team-oriented approach.

Each organization has an organizational structure. By action and/or inaction, managers shape business structures. Trainees are taught how developing an organizational structure and distributing authority ideally requires the leadership ability to judge the potential of every team member. It is through effective leadership training that a manager can delegate the right tasks and authority among the team. The manager's decisions reflect the mission, objectives, goals, and tactics that grew out of the planning function. Specifically, a manager uses leadership skills to decide the following issues, each of which is individually covered in leadership training programs (Ewell, 1997):

These decisions must be made by management in any organization with more than two people. Small does not necessarily mean simple. A small business with three employees and five family members involved, for instance, can be more complex to structurally organize. Organizational structure is particularly important in family businesses, where each family member has multiple roles: family, business, and personal. Confusion among these roles complicates organizational structure decisions. Effective leadership training equips trainees with the skills required to handle these scenarios (Peterson, 1997).

Under such situations, the leadership skills required to organize are even more demanding. Managers are trained to observe the organizational hierarchy, personal specializations, task priorities, and family relationships. A leader is trained to reach such a consensus standpoint that every decision taken for the organizational structure carries the agreement of all involved.

Leadership training highlights that organization charts have important weaknesses from the leadership viewpoint that should concern managers developing and using them:

As a manager, delegation of authority can be a simple technique to get work done, but for a leader, delegation is equally a training opportunity for team members to rise to leadership within their own sphere. Delegation demands the development of leadership talent to recognize the coordination and communication abilities of a team member — not only with respect to the task but also on a personal level (Julius, 1999). A leader is trained to best judge which people within the organization are suited to which tasks, departments, and managers.

The formal structure that management puts in place in each organization has an accompanying informal structure (Julius, 1999), which is largely uncontrollable by management, whether it operates positively or negatively toward them.

Leadership plays a key role in determining the positive or negative qualities of the informal structure, and in giving management an invisible influence over such structures. An effective manager trained to use leadership skills can position himself or herself as an opinion leader within an informal structure, thereby shaping the group's approach to any intra- or inter-organizational issue that may be informally communicated.