Building Leadership Development Systems: Beyond Programmes

When 57% of New Zealand workers are at high risk of burnout and uncertainty pervades our business landscape, traditional leadership programs aren't enough. We need systems that develop resilient leaders and organisations capable of navigating complexity. But what does a truly effective leadership development system look like?

In our previous posts, we explored David Day's five principles of leadership development (article 1) and examined how collective leadership builds organisational capacity (article 2). Now, let's tackle the crucial question: How do we create systems that support continuous leadership growth in challenging times?

The Limitations of Traditional Programs

Think about your organisation's current leadership development efforts. If they're like most, they probably include:

- Annual leadership retreats

- Periodic workshops

- Occasional coaching sessions

- Standard assessment tools

While these components have value, treating them as isolated events severely limits their impact. Instead, Day's research shows we need integrated systems that support ongoing development.

Components of an Effective Development System

Assessment: Beyond Traditional Metrics

Effective assessment in a development system isn't just about measuring current capabilities. It includes:

Leadership Self-Views

Leader identity: How strongly and consistently individuals see themselves as leaders. When someone internalises a leader identity, they're more likely to seek out leadership opportunities and invest time in their development.

Self-awareness: Understanding of not just personality and values but how one's actions impact others. This includes recognising behavioural patterns, blind spots, and the gap between intended and actual impact on others.

Leadership self-efficacy: An individual's confidence in their ability to lead effectively when needed. This belief shapes which leadership challenges people take on and how persistent they are in the face of obstacles.

Technical competencies: The foundational skills needed to perform effectively in current roles. These create credibility and provide the base from which leadership influence can grow.

Leadership capabilities: The interpersonal and strategic skills required for guiding teams and organisations. These include abilities like strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, and decision-making under pressure.

Adaptive capacities: The ability to learn, adjust, and thrive in uncertain conditions. This is particularly crucial in today's volatile business environment, where leaders must navigate unprecedented challenges.

Collective Capabilities

Team dynamics and effectiveness: How well groups work together to achieve shared goals. This includes patterns of collaboration, decision-making processes, and the ability to leverage diverse perspectives.

Network relationships: The strength and quality of connections within and across teams. Strong networks enable faster problem-solving and more effective resource sharing.

Shared leadership capacity: The group's ability to distribute leadership responsibilities based on expertise and context. This creates more resilient organisations that don't depend solely on individual leaders.

Creating Developmental Experiences

In today's high-pressure environment, development must be integrated into daily work. This means:

Strategic Job Assignments

These can include:

Stretch projects: Assignments that push leaders beyond their current capabilities but remain within achievable reach. These provide practical learning opportunities while delivering real business value.

Cross-functional responsibilities: Tasks that require working across different parts of the organisation. This builds a broader perspective and helps leaders understand how various functions contribute to organisational success.

Business context exposure: Opportunities to experience different business situations and challenges. This might include working with different customer segments, markets, or operational contexts.

Matched challenges: Leadership tasks specifically chosen to develop targeted capabilities. These are carefully selected to align with both individual development needs and organisational priorities.

Learning Integration

Activities to support learning integration can include:

Structured reflection: Regular, guided opportunities to process experiences and extract learning. This might involve journaling, coaching conversations, or team debriefs using specific frameworks.

Feedback loops: Systematic ways to gather input about leadership impact and effectiveness. This includes both formal assessments and informal check-ins designed to promote continuous learning.

Peer learning groups: Small cohorts of leaders who meet regularly to share challenges and insights. These groups provide both support and accountability while creating opportunities for collaborative problem-solving.

Action learning: Real-time projects that combine business objectives with learning goals. These projects include structured reflection and feedback to ensure learning happens alongside doing.

Support Mechanisms

With New Zealand's current challenges of retention and burnout, support is crucial. Effective systems include:

Formal Support

Coaching relationships: Structured partnerships with trained coaches who help leaders reflect, grow, and navigate challenges. The coach's role is to ask powerful questions rather than provide answers.

Mentoring networks: Connections with more experienced leaders who share wisdom and open doors to opportunities. Unlike coaches, mentors often provide direct advice based on their experience.

Learning cohorts: Groups of leaders going through development experiences together. These provide structured opportunities for shared learning and mutual support.

Technical advisors: Subject matter experts who help leaders build specific capabilities. They provide targeted guidance in areas crucial for success in current or future roles

Informal Support

Peer networks: Organic connections between leaders facing similar challenges. These relationships often provide practical advice and emotional support during difficult times.

Communities of practice: Groups that form around shared professional interests or challenges. These communities enable knowledge-sharing and collective problem-solving.

Social learning opportunities: Informal situations where leaders can learn from each other's experiences. This might include lunch conversations, virtual chat groups, or spontaneous problem-solving sessions.

Digital collaboration: Online platforms and tools that enable ongoing connection and learning. These create spaces for sharing resources, asking questions, and maintaining momentum between formal development activities.

Measuring Development System Effectiveness

In today's resource-constrained environment, showing ROI is crucial. Consider these metrics:

Proximal Indicators

Leadership self-view changes: Observable shifts in how individuals see themselves as leaders. This includes increased leadership identity strength, enhanced self-awareness, and stronger leadership self-efficacy.

Skill development: Measurable improvements in specific leadership capabilities. Progress can be tracked through assessments, feedback, and performance in challenging situations.

Learning application: Evidence that leaders are using new insights and capabilities in their work. This might show up in changed approaches to problems or different ways of engaging with teams.

Behavioural changes: Visible shifts in how leaders act in their roles. These changes should align with development goals and organisational needs.

Distal Outcomes

While proximal indicators show immediate progress, distal outcomes demonstrate the longer-term impact of leadership development systems.?No doubt you're familiar with the first three:

Team performance improvements manifest through enhanced collaboration, more effective decision-making, and stronger results against key performance indicators.?

Employee engagement levels typically show meaningful increases as leaders develop better capabilities for motivating and connecting with their teams, creating more purposeful work environments.?

Retention rates often improve as employees experience better leadership and see clearer development pathways within the organisation.?

Perhaps most importantly, organisational adaptability measures demonstrate the system's success in building collective leadership capacity. This includes:

• tracking how quickly and effectively the organisation responds to change
• the flexibility of leadership networks to reconfigure based on challenges
• increased learning agility across all levels
• expanded capability indicators showing broader skill sets
• improved resilience metrics revealing the organisation's ability to maintain performance under pressure.

These distal outcomes, while taking longer to achieve, provide compelling evidence of the development system's impact on organisational effectiveness.

Implementation Strategies?

Given current economic pressures, how can organisations build effective development systems?

1. Review Current Practices

A thorough review of current practices forms the essential first step in building an effective leadership development system.?

- Map existing development activities. Begin by mapping existing development activities across the organisation, including formal programs, informal learning opportunities, and on-the-job development experiences. This creates a comprehensive picture of current investments and approaches.

- Identify gaps and redundancies. Next, conduct a careful analysis to identify gaps where critical development needs aren't being met, as well as redundancies where resources might be used more efficiently.

- Assess alignment with Day's five principles. Assess how well current practices align with Day's five principles of leadership development, particularly examining whether activities support sustained development over time and leverage real-world experiences effectively.?

- Evaluate resource allocation. Evaluate resource allocation across different development initiatives, considering both financial investments and time commitments. This evaluation should examine whether resources are being directed toward activities with the highest potential impact on leadership capability.

2. Build Integration Points

Connect development to business strategy: Link leadership development activities directly to organisational priorities and challenges. This ensures development efforts support business success while providing meaningful learning opportunities.

Link individual and collective development: Create connections between personal growth and team capability building. This might involve combining individual coaching with team development activities.

Align with performance management: Integrate development goals and progress into regular performance discussions and reviews. This helps maintain focus on growth while ensuring accountability.

Create feedback loops: Establish systematic ways to gather data about development impact and adjust approaches accordingly. This includes both formal metrics and informal input about what's working and what needs to change.

3. Create Supporting Infrastructure

A robust supporting infrastructure provides the foundation for sustainable leadership development.?This can include:

Digital platforms for learning and collaboration. Digital platforms for learning and collaboration should be carefully selected and implemented to facilitate both structured learning activities and informal knowledge sharing among leaders. These platforms need to support various learning modalities and enable easy access to development resources.

Assessment and tracking tools. Assessment and tracking tools must be integrated to measure progress and gather data on development outcomes, ensuring they align with the organisation's chosen success metrics.

Communication channels. Clear communication channels should be established to share information about development opportunities, celebrate progress, and maintain engagement with the development system.

Resource repositories. Create comprehensive resource repositories that house learning materials, best practices, case studies, and other development tools, making them easily accessible to leaders at all levels.

4. Develop Measurement Approaches

Effective measurement is crucial for demonstrating impact and guiding system improvements. This can include:

Define success metrics. Start by defining clear success metrics that align with both development objectives and organisational goals. These metrics should include both quantitative measures like skill assessments and qualitative indicators such as behavioural changes.?

Establish baseline measures. Establish baseline measures for all key metrics before implementing new development initiatives, ensuring you can accurately track progress over time.?

Create tracking mechanisms. Create systematic tracking mechanisms that gather data regularly without creating undue administrative burden. These mechanisms should include both formal assessments and informal feedback channels.?

Report on impact. Develop clear reporting processes that communicate progress and impact to all stakeholders, from individual participants to senior leadership.

Making It Work in Today's Context

With resource constraints and high pressure on New Zealand organisations, consider these practical steps:

1. Start Small

A phased implementation approach maximises success likelihood while managing resources effectively.

Begin with pilot groups focussing on high-impact areas. Start small by selecting pilot groups that represent different organisational areas, focusing on high-impact areas where leadership development can address pressing business needs.

Learn and adjust. Learn from these initial efforts and adjust approaches based on feedback and results before scaling to larger groups.?

Scale successful approaches. When scaling, carefully document successful approaches to ensure consistent implementation.

2. Leverage Existing Resources

Repurpose current programs. Leverage existing resources by repurposing current programs that show positive results.

Use internal expertise. Draw on internal expertise through mentoring and knowledge-sharing initiatives.

Create structured peer learning opportunities. These could include:

• Action Learning Groups. Small groups of leaders working together on real business challenges, meeting regularly and using a specific problem-solving framework.
• Leadership Labs. Cross-functional groups meeting regularly to practice specific leadership skills.
• Developmental Networks. Structured pairs or triads of leaders at similar levels meeting regularly focussing on: practicing new leadership behaviours; sharing challenges and solutions; accountability for development goals; joint reflection on experiences.
• Communities of Practice
• Peer Coaching Cohorts

Maximise the use of technology platforms. This approach helps contain costs while building on proven elements of your current approach.

3. Build Gradually

This measured approach helps ensure sustainable development while managing resource constraints.

Build gradually by adding components systematically, ensuring each new element integrates effectively with existing pieces.

Test new approaches rigorously, gathering both quantitative and qualitative evidence of impact.

Regular feedback loops should inform ongoing refinements, with careful documentation of what works and what doesn't.

Maintain momentum through regular progress reports that demonstrate the value being created, adjusting approaches based on emerging needs and lessons learned.

Looking Ahead

In our final post, we'll explore how these concepts come together in the Ways of Working Team Coaching Programme, offering a practical example of systematic leadership development in action.

For now, consider: How might you begin transforming your organisation's leadership development approach from traditional programs to an integrated system? What small steps could you take to start this transformation while managing current pressures and constraints?

Remember, in times of uncertainty, investing in systematic leadership development isn't just about building capability - it's about creating organisational resilience for whatever challenges lie ahead.