Why You Need a Formal Leadership Development Strategy

When we talk with our corporate learning partners, we’re hearing about a number of common issues affecting leaders in our current climate. The fact is, the job of leaders and managers is becoming vastly more complex than ever before. There is a growing need for leadership development to support managing successful teams, building listening and collaboration skills, having difficult conversations, and more. Some organizations are scaling up hiring because of an increased demand in products and services during the post- COVID-19 era. As the hiring freeze begins to thaw, many companies are wondering how they’re going to fill leadership roles quickly and effectively.

Organizations are seeking ways to effectively deliver leadership development training solutions to nurture their leaders and to groom future leaders. They need consistent quality in training solutions to ensure that new and existing leaders and managers are prepared to help support an increase in demand and productivity.

Do you have a leadership development strategy?

Scaling up an organization during the best of times is a complicated endeavor. New hires need to understand your company’s standard operating procedures, core values and culture, and how to lead in-person and remote teams effectively. In other words, they’re not being trained sufficiently to thrive, let alone become champions of leadership.

Many organizations go through the process of hiring and onboarding leaders and managers without a formal leadership development strategy in place. This leaves them at risk of developing gaps in learning and critical skills required to do their jobs. Rather than relying on traditional hiring practices, we’re seeing a major shift in talent management where organizations are developing specific strategies to find, retain, and train their future leaders.

What strong leadership development looks like

Organizations need to have insight into how training is progressing and measure the outcomes to ensure that the strategy is functioning as planned. They need to track KPIs to benchmark performance success and identify gaps early. Here’s a breakdown of the top three KPIs that organizations should be paying attention to:

• Retention
• Vitality 
• Key candidates for career progression

Retention. Providing leadership development is one thing, but being able to measure whether it helps to retain quality talent, is more important. Since research shows that the cost to replace a manager is approximately $12,000, this KPI directly impacts business expenses that your top executives are going to want to control and contain.

Vitality. Whether supporting existing leaders or nurturing future leaders, your leadership development strategy should include KPIs that measure learning engagement and flag candidates that demonstrate potential leadership qualities to pay attention to. One way to increase engagement is to establish a badging system where learners can earn points to demonstrate their absorption of learning. This metric can help to flag high-potential employees who are most interested in career progression.

Candidate Identification. While retention is great, there’s even more value in helping those dedicated employees move up the career ladder to support your team and organization for years to come. To prove the success of your leadership development program, consider a KPI that measures the percentage of high-potential candidates the training program can identify. This way, you can demonstrate to executives the value your program brings to the organization and reveal hidden gems that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Standardizing your learning and training

Acquisitions can help organizations diversify their talent pool and bring fresh perspectives. However, leaders and managers may have different styles than yours. As well, onboarding employees from different companies and with different learning programs of their own, can cause chaos. Learning and development professionals would prefer to homogenize learning to ensure that incoming employees are receiving the same level of training as the parent organization.

Part of successful leadership development and training requires that consideration be given to leveling the playing field. You set the standard for what makes a good leader. Standardizing your leadership development program ensures skill alignment and that all managers and leaders understand exactly what you expect from them. 

Nurturing the leaders of the future

There’s value in creating a leadership development program for all employees, not strictly leaders and managers. We’ve seen a great deal of success when a company creates a two-tier program, which includes general employees—those who might have hidden potential. There’s considerable ROI involved with helping an employee progress to higher positions in the organization. Training costs are reduced since future leaders have already undergone considerable training and development. With a deep understanding of your company’s culture and values, organizational structure, and long-term business strategy, these employees can evolve rapidly into leadership positions.

If you’re interested in learning more about building a successful leadership development and training program, we’d love to hear from you. We can help connect you with success stories and use cases that demonstrate how leadership development can be an effective strategy for your organization. At the same time, we can walk you through the various high-impact eLearning tools such as badging, social learning, and microlearning to help supercharge your leadership development strategy.

The article was originally published on the CoreAxis blog.