Showing posts with label Leadership Development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Leadership Development. Show all posts

October 20, 2007

Leadership Development and Enterprise Architecture

Fortune Magazine, 1 October 2007, reports on the world’s best companies are finding out that “no matter what business they’re in, their real business is building leaders.”

“’People are our greatest asset’, CEOs always say that. They almost never mean it. Most companies maintain their office copiers better than they build the capabilities of their people.” But now companies are finding in this high liquidity market, that they are less dependent on financial capital, and more on human capital, and so they are getting serious about leadership development!

Fortune provides a number of good ideas for organizations to help develop their future leaders:

  1. Invest in leadership—“you don’t build leaders on the cheap.” You’ve got to invest not only money, but also the time of the organization’s executives to help develop leaders.
  2. Identify leaders early—“begin to evaluate leadership capability on day one of employment.” Moreover, begin their leadership development early.
  3. Assign leadership positions strategically—assign promising leaders to work on things they need work on, rather than those things they are already good at: challenge them!
  4. Give lots of honest feedback—Provide feedback on a continuing basis and make it candid!
  5. Inspire leaders to perform—motivate performance through sense of mission; passion for one’s job in an organization is contagious.

In a world economy built on human capital, organizations must develop their leaders and mean it!

While many incorrectly think of enterprise architecture as simply a technology-based endeavor, EA is really a broad-based blueprint for the organization.

In User-centric EA, we look to build the capabilities of the organization to meet mission requirements: this includes everything from technology solutions, to more efficient business processes, to information sharing, to human capital development.

Previously, I have called for a human capital reference model (and persepctive) to be added to the Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA):

The pressing need for more and better leadership (and management) development is yet another reason to finally get this done by really focusing attention on the organization’s human capital needs through its inclusion in the FEA.


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