Leadership is too important a role to be left to the untrained. When employees get promoted to the new role that requires them to demonstrate leadership - modeling the way, sharing an inspired vision, challenging the process, enabling others to act and encouraging the heart (Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge), they often have very little to draw from. That's the very reason why a lot of them fail. This is a serious concern because their impact on the organization, whether positive or negative, multiply when they are assigned to supervisory or managerial roles. First and foremost, leaders must know the difference between their roles now and the one they left behind. More than the technical side of it, they need to accept that as leaders, they need to start thinking like leaders. They need to understand the dynamics of teams, they need to know how to coach and align people with the organization's directions. They need to know how to use communication to instruct, to inspire and to keep employees aligned.

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