As the world moves toward a hybrid work model and tight labor conditions leave many organizations looking desperately for help, it seems like the development of strong, highly adaptable future leaders should be more important than ever. It remains imperative to ask, “Why is leadership development important?”
Judging from how much organizations spend on leadership development programs, it certainly seems like they know why leadership development is so important. case; one industry publication estimates global expenditures to be over $350 billion.
This is at the higher end of the estimate spectrum, but either way, the bottom line is that organizations clearly believe in the benefits of leadership development. For too many of them, though, there’s not much to show for their efforts. If this sounds like your organization, it may be time to ask yourself some hard questions.
The Importance of Leadership Development
Six Questions to Ask Yourself About Your Leadership Development Efforts
1. Is the Context Right?
Unfortunately, you can’t just sprinkle leadership dust around your conference room and expect things to change. If you want to ensure that leadership development gets strong traction in your company, you have to prepare your leaders to be successful within the specific context of your organization.
This means aligning your efforts with two critical elements: your organization’s competitive requirements and its strategy.
The beauty of this approach, and the benefits of leadership development that stem from it, is that it allows you to customize your leadership development to your organization’s unique needs, increasing the chances of success when it comes to senior leaders and company performance. The agony is that it requires you to customize your leadership development.
Becoming an Excellent Leader is a Work in Progress
And the work begins with a single step: Booking a session with a leadership coach.
It is important for Leadership Development to be Tailored for Your Organization
Too many leadership development programs focus on improving generic competencies like delegation, giving feedback, or coaching. Or maybe they include off-site workshops that attempt to simulate specific workplace challenges, but since the exercises take place in a vacuum, when employees return to the real world, very little gets retained.
It’s essential for your high potentials to understand how their actions, and their team members’, tie directly to the organization’s commitments. If they don’t, start by closing that gap. Once this is solved all of the other pieces should start coming together.
2. Is it Grounded in Reliable, Valid Feedback?
As you’re probably well aware, information is only as good as its sources.
- Are leaders in your organization getting quantitative and qualitative data from their most important stakeholders—direct reports, peers, internal customers, superiors—on how they’re perceived?
- And is someone sitting down with them to interpret data once they get it?
Many companies run an off-the-shelf 360-degree feedback tool, flip the report under the door, and say, “Here you go. If you have any questions, call HR.” That’s it. If the report gets read at all, leaders don’t even know what to do with it.
If this is how the feedback process works in your organization, next time try going deeper. Ask leaders to break down the data they receive with a sponsor (possibly a boss, but it could be anyone who’s supporting their development). Then have the leader go back to the people who provided the feedback and tell them what the leader learned and what they plan to do about it.
By encouraging this process, you ensure that leaders get truly useful feedback and take the effort to act on it. Not to mention, offering this kind of tailored attention is a very good way to improve employee retention and highlight why leadership development is important.
“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.” –Harvey Firestone
3. Is Your Leadership Development Effort Experiential?
As we’ve discussed in previous posts, leadership development should tilt much more toward application than theory. It may be uncomfortable handing off responsibilities to leaders in training, but real-world experience is far more valuable when it comes to cultivating leadership that can thrive in an unpredictable business environment.
To that end, are there opportunities for the leaders you’re developing to get their hands on important initiatives or critical challenges the company’s facing? And if so, will they have a mentor or coach working alongside them to reverse-engineer what they’re doing?
Tip
The goal is to offer future leaders a window into their capabilities: how they can be better leaders, things they're good at, strengths that emerge from their work, or places where they're struggling. There are few better ways to become a good leader than . . . working to become a good leader.
As far as responsibilities go, the leader could be put in charge of closing a capability gap, launching a new product, or building a new process for the organization. The specifics don’t matter as much as the stakes. The task should be beefy enough that those performing it feel a sense of ownership and have a sense that “this is important and I shouldn’t screw it up.”
4. The Importance of Leadership Training and Development: Are Your Development Efforts a Two-Way Street?
If it’s not clear by now, developing leadership skill sets should be thought of as a dialogue or duet. It’s a process of engagement and give and take. It’s a relationship. Ask yourself: do the people you hope to develop have access to effective, senior leaders? And have other senior leaders taken the time to familiarize themselves with these potential future leaders?
Suffice it to say, not knowing anything about who’s on deck can be a real problem when it comes time to succession plan.
When possible, developing leaders should be given opportunities to be mentored by those senior leaders. Regular conversations, whether the topics discussed are positive or negative, can go a long way in finding and building up talent.
Remember that your enterprise talent pipeline is owned by the senior leaders, not Human Resources. Simply checking off a list of boxes is no way to find a successor.
5. Are Connections Between Managers and Future Talent Flourishing Across the Organization?
Long-term development isn’t a one-time visit or a quick video chat. As discussed, it’s about forming meaningful relationships. This means that your team has to make outreach a priority.
- Are your managers expanding their network within your organization?
- Are they getting a chance to meet new people, learn about new departments, and broaden their perspective about how things work in the organization beyond their own world?
If the answer to each of these questions is affirmative, it’s a strong sign that outreach is working.
The importance of leadership training and development lies in what it can do for your business. Learn more with these blogs:
6. The Benefits of Leadership Development Programs: Are Your Efforts for Leadership Development Being Refreshed?
Once you’ve gotten good results from your leadership development efforts, you’ll probably want to institutionalize them. Having a system that stands on its own can be immensely helpful; even if a key manager leaves the organization, the talent development pipeline will keep running. But you have to be careful here.
Over the years I’ve seen many companies with good systems who’ve nevertheless struggled because their content hasn’t changed. They’re still using the same approaches and processes they used ten, twenty years ago. (Quick tip: If your leadership development documents include a reference to BlackBerries, it’s time for an overhaul.)
You don’t have to start from scratch every year, but you do need to keep things fresh-ish.
You Know the Importance of Leadership Development, Now it’s Time for Next Steps
If the honest answer to any of these questions is no, don’t despair. Be grateful for the clarity of knowing exactly what you need to work toward. This is true no matter where you currently stand.
As you implement a more deliberate, institutionalized leadership management system you’ll find the future of your organization looks brighter and brighter. It may not be today, but you’ll undoubtedly see for yourself—and your organization—the benefits of leadership development coaching programs and a return on investment.