Leadership diaries: an idea for leadership development

I had an awesome idea today. Well I think it’s an awesome idea.  I was discussing social learning with a colleague and then, as I was driving home, I was pondering how to put social learning into practice. An idea was born. “What is it?” You ask. Well I have given it a handy little title: Leadership Diaries. “Yeah, but what IS it?” You ask again. It’s a concept whereby leaders (or managers) keep a blog each week (or couple of weeks) on what they have learnt, their perceptions, or their ideas. These people are networked to each other’s blogs so they can comment and discuss ideas. This concept has two purposes. Firstly, to get leaders to reflect on their leadership experience. What has worked for them and what hasn’t? In True North by Bill George leadership is developed by continual reflection. Writing things down helps with reflection. Secondly, It shares knowledge with other leaders. Obviously there is a lot of learning from that.

It’s a derivative of an idea I came up with over a year ago for a manager help group. Kind of like alcoholics anonymous (and I use that comparison lightly) for managers - “Hi, my name is (insert name here), and I have a problem employee/don’t know what to do/would like some advice”. Now this idea came about from a situation where I found it very difficult to take my own advice. My advice usually involves things like empowering, coaching and all those other warm fuzzy things that are supposed to encourage performance. Except that I had already tried all of those things, and the only option I saw left was to strangle this person and dump the body (I have a very dry sense of humor so please don’t take me literally on this – you get the picture though). Now I’m quite sure there are more managers who feel this way every now and then and it’s very helpful to vent with other people who understand the frustration. It’s also useful to have someone who can put things in perspective and offer suggestions. I was lucky I had an awesome manager to help me with this – and I certainly learnt a lot!

I still think a manager help group is a great idea, but I think that ‘leadership diaries’ has a much more positive spin and is more focused on day-to-day learning rather than crisis learning. You’d also have quite a few problems with airing dirty laundry in a public space with a manager help group type blog. It would be very difficult to maintain confidentiality.  Therefore you would have to have clear parameters around what could or could not be included in the blog. I have not thought of those yet, more to ponder.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Would your managers and/or leaders use something like this? What kind of parameters would you put around it? And hey, if you’d like to use my idea then please do let me know how it goes.