Leadership Development for young professionals - Bob Wheeler

Recent conversations with a number of young professionals such as pharmacists, engineers, occupational therapists and doctors have made me reflect again on what needs to be done to develop leadership skills early in young people’s careers. It has always been a challenge for young graduates and professionals to take responsibility for teams consisting of more experienced, older people. It appears that this challenge is now being faced even earlier for many newly qualified graduates and professionals, often in the context of managing multi-disciplinary teams.

This is perhaps inevitable when you consider two significant trends. Firstly structures have become flatter, so it is inevitable that people will be leading multi-disciplinary teams earlier. Secondly, more newly trained professionals have been joining smaller organisations early in their careers; and even those who join larger organisations (such as the NHS) will be likely to be joining smaller, more discrete business units.

In this context, the nature of professional structures mean that in practice the most qualified person often has to take the team responsibility – the Doctor in the surgical team, the teacher in the classroom team of teacher and teaching assistants etc. It seems to me that it becomes really important that people have early training in basic understanding and skills so that they have a chance of surviving long enough as first line managers to be able to learn by experience if an unsustainable drop-out rate is to be avoided. My first thoughts about a minimum training list are teamwork, assertiveness, communication skills (including feedback), leadership styles and basic understanding of organisational procedures. I’d be interested in others’ views.