Markon Leadership Development: Practice Makes Perfect

Markon has achieved nine consecutive years of 20%+ revenue growth. We believe a key component of our success has been the growth and development of leaders within our firm. Emerging leaders are the future of your company. As your company grows, leadership needs to expand. You must invest in developing leaders today.

Leadership is a skill no different than many others—if you don’t practice, you won’t get any better. Companies must be proactive in giving their emerging leaders opportunities to practice being a leader and practice failing as a leader.

The most common skill our clients request is leadership and, of course, our clients want experienced leaders who have already learned their lessons on someone else’s project.

How will your key employees gain leadership skills if your clients do not give them an opportunity? 

You must provide that opportunity internally. Markon’s answer to this tough “catch-22” is what we call our Leadership Opportunities Portal (LOP). This portal is simply a description of internal projects where the company needs someone to take some initiative and be the lead. Typically, a more experienced sponsor is the person creating the opportunity and working with the emerging leader to solve a problem.

This approach provides significant benefits to both the employee and the company. The employee is gaining confidence and experience making decisions, meeting deadlines, and dealing with the pressure of being held accountable for accomplishing a specific goal.

Markon looks at this as a long-term investment in our employees and as a company we are now gaining an experienced leader who can apply those skills in a client environment.

Markon’s answer to this leadership gap is our Leadership Opportunities Portal. What techniques or methods are you using?