Leadership Development: A New Business Imperative
By Steve Gravenkemper
Reprinted from Corporate Insights

Developing future leaders within organizations has become a critical business imperative for CEOs. Senior executives recognize that leadership development cannot be left to chance — because ultimately, you win with people. Best-in-class leadership development programs engage senior leaders via sponsorship and active participation.

There are two key advantages of developing top talent and high-potential employees within your organization:

1. Future leaders have a thorough understanding of the organization’s culture. The inability to fit into the culture is the primary reason external leaders who are recruited into a new organization fail.
2. Top talent and high-potential employees are more likely to stay if they perceive the organization is proactively investing in developing their skills to prepare them for future roles.

In short, organizations are learning that when it comes to tomorrow’s leaders, it’s better to develop them within the organization than to look outside.

Building a Leadership Success Template

Leaders execute strategy. Consequently, the foundational step for successful programs begins with defining those leadership skills and behaviors that are linked to that business strategy.

Once identified, these leadership skills and behaviors provide a template for developing future leaders. Failure to link leadership development programs to key business imperatives presents the risk of developing skills that are either unrelated to the success of the business or are in conflict with organizational goals.

It’s important that developing leaders know where they stand in relationship to this success template. This includes identifying strengths and areas for leadership development — so future leaders can build on strengths and target specific areas for greater development.

There are a variety of assessment tools that that can be helpful in defining these strengths and areas for development. Frequently used tools include performance evaluations, supervisory suggestions, executive and managerial assessments, 360-degree feedback instruments and assessment centers. Each provides data that can prove helpful for creating leadership development plans.

Creating Individual Action Plans

Assessment information yields information that can be used to create plans for individual development. Remember that effective action plans are:

• Specific: Targeting specific behaviors and action steps will increase the odds of success.
• Practical: Focus on applying new skills directly into the work setting. Millions of training dollars are wasted as managers attend off-site training activities yet fail to apply this new knowledge to the job.
• Feedback rich: People learn best when they receive direct feedback on newly practiced skills and behaviors. In the absence of feedback, managers miss opportunities to benefit from practicing new skills, or to modify partially successful or unsuccessful new behaviors.
• Focused on follow-up: Build in checkup periods for monitoring progress. This is critical, especially if the direct supervisor is actively included in these checkups. The primary threat to individual leadership development plans is dust. Without regular monitoring and the active interest of a supervisor, leadership development gives way to the business “crisis of the day” and collects dust on the shelf.

Organizations on the cutting edge of leadership development have deciphered the code for enduring success: They realize that developing their next group of leaders is a critical strategic objective. Not only does this help retain top talent, but it also helps ensure that the next wave of leaders is prepared to propel your organization forward strategically, operationally and culturally.

Action Learning: Real Time, Real-World Leadership Development

Action learning has become a popular tool in the development of top talent and high-potential employees. Typical steps of such programs include:

• The senior executive team identifies and creates a cross-functional team of high-potential staff members.
• Senior executives then identify a current organizational challenge for the team to address.
• The cross-functional team members meet and receive their “action learning” assignment.
• A facilitator provides an introduction to and explains the key principles of action learning assignments.
• The action learning team meets regularly and is provided access to organizational resources needed to complete the assignment.
• The action learning team presents their recommendations to the senior management team.