Apps for leaders: create your best leadership habits with your device

Standout is the stand out app for leadership, writes Perry Timms

There aren’t that many leadership development apps specifically built to help you be the best leader you could be.

Sure there’s TED.com and a range of productivity apps. Yet to be a better leader requires the focus of habit, learning, application, review and most of all synchronicity with the busy world we operate in.

Marcus Buckingham is famous for his books and talks on First Break All The Rules and his strengths-based assessment tools and philosophy Standout.

His app has important habit-forming aspects, together with the ability to journal your time and link to larger aspirational development activities, typical of any app developer and particularly like the native mobile app developers from Glasgow.

More specifically, Standout (an iOS only app at present) has:

• Dynamic teaming – without the need to plot who is working with who on an org chart, you can connect people to each other to show how your teams have banded together. And simple updates allow you to show you how they’ve disbanded and reassembled onto a new project or venture

• Check-ins – reminders and records of what’s important to your team to help you focus on their needs and help set priority activities and direction

• Real-time engagement – why wait for pulse surveys when this tool gives you up to the minute ratings and commentary on how committed, applied and positive people are about your leadership?

• Next-generation performance management – dashboards and algorithms help produce unbiased assessments of performance

Adopting a coaching approach to leadership and management, this app warrants a good look into whether technology here can really help leaders learn, tune in and adapt to what their people need to be their best.

Perry Timms is an independent HR/OD practitioner, speaker, writer and CIPD adviser on social media and engagement. Tweet him @PerryTimms