Leadership Development
Leadership development is evolving at lightning speed. Leading a company was once considered to be an expertise in and of itself – the “boss” gave orders that staff were expected to follow. But now, leadership is no longer something you’re “just born with”. Running an organization at any level requires a mix of skills that need to be nurtured. For this reason, it is vital for businesses to approach leadership development by using the most effective L&D tools.
What Is Leadership Development?
Leadership development is the method by which supervisors, managers, and executives establish and improve the skills, knowledge, and talents that they require to lead people.
Leadership development covers both soft skills and hard skills. A leader must understand how to effectively manage employees on a human level. At the same time, they need the ability to deal with operational factors like production quality, budgets, and schedules.
One could argue that leadership development is a subset of employee development activities. This is because leaders naturally have functions as employees in addition to being in charge of other people. For example, a CFO must understand both a financial statement and be able to direct the analysts in the department about how to prepare a statement. Therefore, leaders often require development in operational areas as well as for specific leadership tasks.
Why Is Leadership Development Important?
A company is only as good as its employees, and skilled management is integral to ensuring that workers apply their talents in the most effective ways. Leadership development can provide optimal employee management, procedural continuity, and wise decisions that lead to important benefits for the entire organization.
Increased Profit
Businesses exist to turn a profit, so there can be hesitation when it comes to implementing leadership development programs. Developing leaders takes time away from their daily tasks, while the programs themselves can be costly.
However, the evidence shows that leadership development does a great job of paying for itself. A good leader should already have the talent to drive the work of their department forward, and skill development only makes them more capable. For example, an ICF study revealed that, for 86% of organizations, leadership coaching can provide an average ROI of 100%.
Higher Satisfaction and Retention
Employee engagement is crucial for any organization that wants to reduce turnover and retain skilled employees. This is even more so for leaders, who want to appear competent in front of the people whom they are leading. To enable the skills that lead to managerial proficiency, leaders should receive the training that they need to optimize their own performance. In addition, like any worker, receiving proper development is essential to morale and a feeling that the company is supporting the leader’s career progress.
Skill Transfer
Upon retirement or promotion, it is vital for former leaders to be replaced by new leaders as seamlessly as possible. However, many organizations greatly depend on built-up knowledge that is specific to a particular company. This includes specialized fields of know-how such as the comprehension of trade secrets, maintenance of professional contacts, and understanding of how the organization functions. Leadership development allows for succession planning in the transfer of these skills to the next generation.
Improved Management
This sounds obvious, but in reality, many of those gaining leadership positions are unprepared for their new role. Recent graduates and managers promoted to a higher level in the company may have been excellent performers to obtain a leadership position, but this in no way guarantees that they can handle their current responsibilities. Leadership development is essential for getting such people ‘up to speed’.
Strategic Success
Effective leadership development has a two-fold effect on the proper formation and implementation of strategy. First, it tends to nurture problem-solving skills that every leader needs when challenges arise.
Secondly, particularly in the case of mentoring, leadership development should give managers insight into a company’s secrets to success, the challenges they are going to face, and insight into dealing with the future.
How Have Leadership Skills Changed?
For many decades, the typical leader spent their entire career in one place. Technologies changed relatively slowly, while in general, companies were “lo-tech”. Technical work was performed by lower-level employees. It was the role of the “boss” to act according to the idea of positional leadership, where authority was a function of someone’s place in the organizational hierarchy, and not as a result of leadership abilities.
This sort of organizational culture is pretty rare today. The high rate of technological advancement means that leadership skill sets change frequently. Higher rates of employee turnover mean that employees divide their careers between various organizations and so they need frequent professional development to remain competitive. In addition, with many economies being knowledge-based, any successful leadership style will include strong communication skills, the capacity for change management, and emotional intelligence. Finally, the move away from single-company careers has provided more chances for high potentials to also become great leaders, which in turn requires leadership skill development.
Current Leadership Skill Challenges
But this is only a start. The exact mix of optimal leadership soft skills will continue to change. It’s anybody’s guess what future leaders will deal with, so HR teams should perform frequent skills gap analyses, track the emergence of necessary skills in their industry, and constantly refine their approach to development programs.
Nowadays, according to this article by the Harvard Business Review, organizations are facing a crisis of managerial failure, and need to improve leadership skills with a focus on the following steps:
Ensuring Self-Awareness
Managers are generally overconfident when it comes to their skill levels. Although more than 80% feel they have sufficient abilities, HR teams say that the actual number is closer to 20%. The sad fact is, that managers who lack self-awareness have a failure rate that is almost triple that of those who possess it. An overconfident manager may respond poorly to feedback, be reluctant to delegate tasks (even when they are incompetent) and rely on their superiors for everyday decisions.
Building Empathy
It’s essential for a manager to show empathy towards subordinates. But it’s just as important for employees to show “upward empathy”. When this is lacking – an occurrence in more than 1/3rd of teams – the chance of manager failure increases by almost four times. Such employees often believe that they are just as talented as their manager, fail to consider their manager’s needs, and put all of the responsibility for achieving objectives in the hands of the manager. It is essential for managers to expose a lack of empathy from employees, while HR should implement related soft skill courses for teams.
Optimizing Hybrid
More than half of employees state that their manager’s approach to hybrid work is not succeeding. In addition to affecting team productivity, these issues nearly triple the chance that the manager will fail. Of course, this is a relatively new area of supervision for many of us. To improve the hybrid work dynamic, managers should:
- Assist employees with their hybrid work methods (instead of looking only at results)
- Establish team-wide collaboration
- Allow employees to set at least part of the online discussion agenda
- Make such sessions a regular part of the workday
Applying Adaptive Leadership
When change occurs – as the result of a strategic plan or due to a crisis – managers tend to throw out the most logical approaches. Instead, they direct employees to take on tasks that are not suitable for their level of skill, frequently change objectives, and commit workers to vague targets. To get back on track, they should take advantage of training in change management and never lose focus on company objectives.
Best Leadership Development Practices
Regardless of the particular skills that are part of a leadership development program, there is a set of best practices that should apply to every initiative. According to the Harvard Business Review, there are seven critical steps that companies can take to implement productive leadership development. You might notice that they are self-reinforcing, i.e. that one best practice supports the others.
Move Beyond Professional Skills
Leadership development should consider an employee’s total personality, and not just their approach to work. That’s why skills such as self-awareness are vital. The goal is to change a leader’s “whole self” in ways that can affect (and hopefully improve) their home life as well. A coaching engagement that includes a deep analysis of a leader’s personality can go a long way.
Encourage Reflection
Hand-in-hand with the idea of self-awareness is reflection. One of the reasons that a leader might not be performing at a top level is because they have lost sight of personal values or a sense of purpose at work. The result is that they see work as a daily grind instead of something fulfilling. Leadership development should include sessions where an employee takes a step back to reconsider their attitude towards their profession, with an eye towards making it meaningful. For example, a coach and a leader can devote an entire session simply to discussing the ways in which a leader’s career has been both satisfying and disappointing.
Discuss Stress
One feeling that often goes along with the job of being a leader is stress. Managers tend to have complex roles, deal with ambiguity, and be more accountable than non-manager employees. According to Forbes, mid-level managers face the most stress of the major employee groups (the others being executives and team members). Reducing stress can occur when leaders reflect on their roles and find meaning in their jobs, as mentioned above.
Include Short Courses
Some leadership development courses are extensive, with attendees facing multiple issues. However, when possible, running programs of between two and four days can yield significant results. Short programs allow employees to focus on a particular skill while minimizing the time and cost needed by the program.
Revisit Attendee Lists
Just as not everyone wants to be a leader, so too not every employee wants to invest hours of their time in development programs. Upon initiating a leadership development plan, and also while it is underway, it is important to assess the employee’s true commitment. Some people don’t want to refuse development opportunities but don’t want to put in lots of effort either. At some point, you might realize that an employee simply isn’t interested. At that stage, they can be shifted to a less difficult program, or asked if they want to stay in the program at all. Employees who have gone through other aspects of these best practices might be more prepared for a serious commitment to development.
Check Long-Term Benefits
The forgetting curve and a lack of skill application can lead an employee to forget significant parts of the leadership training that they have received. It’s up to HR to send such employees to periodic refreshers. In addition, identifying courses that are designed for a long-lasting impact should be part of the evaluation process.
Use Online Programs
Not every learning development course is suited for online study. For instance, stretch assignments like job rotation, or in-depth mentoring sessions, are more useful in person. However, the Harvard study showed no difference between virtual and in-person training (while admitting that this was out of the scope of the research). Considering that the former can be more convenient and less expensive, HR teams should definitely consider making online courses a prominent part of the mix. Evaluations can then be applied to check whether online programs maintain the quality of training and, if necessary, revert to in-person.
The Basics of Leadership Development Programs
According to Statista, leadership and management training was the top L&D priority for 45% of companies in the US in 2022. Organizations put a lot of emphasis on leadership experts to ensure that their best and brightest have critical skills, so manager-oriented L&D is essential for organizational survival. Let’s examine the framework of a successful leadership development program.
Finding Candidates
There are two kinds of employees who are part of leadership development programs – those with potential who need to be trained from square one, and those who are already leaders but need upskilling.
When it comes to potential leaders, companies with a Growth Mindset understand that every employee is capable of moving up. But there are unique pressures that are part of being a manager. That’s why it is essential to choose the right candidates for leadership development. After all, some workers are happy in their current roles or don’t want the responsibilities connected to leading.
One way to build a list of employees with leadership potential is with talent development programs. A result of these programs is a report that profiles individual employee skills. Candidates for leadership programs will display strong leadership skills including self-awareness, communication, flexibility, and strategic thinking.
Sourcing Leadership Experts
Technical training is sometimes used to improve the hard skills of leaders, but it’s much more common in a leadership program to apply coaching and mentoring for soft skills. Internal mentors deliver a practical mix of organization-specific knowledge and close attention to a coaching style of engagement. In comparison, external mentors tend to be more aware of the most modern upskilling techniques. However, when candidates need development that is free of the bias associated with a mentor’s experience in a specific industry, coaches are the best choice.
Choosing a Setting
Leadership experts will often have a particular setting and training style in mind. This might be their personal preference or the best selection for a particular skill. For instance, executive leadership development often uses a 1:1 coaching engagement, while new managers are best trained in workshops. There are many creative solutions when it comes to settings for effective L&D, such as microlessons, stretch assignments, and external coursework.
Determining Results
Measuring the effectiveness of an L&D program is one of the greatest challenges that HR teams face. Starting the initiative with a set of measurable goals that are connected to company requirements is a good first step. However, evaluations during and after the course can be difficult. Leaders are often trained in soft skills, and metrics in this area tend to be subjective. In addition, when dozens or even hundreds of employees are part of leadership training, the method of evaluating and tracking progress on a large scale becomes awkward. Perhaps the best move when it comes to this vital step is to use a talent development platform.
Leadership Development with Growthspace
Despite the importance of leadership development, studies suggest that many organizations are either not implementing relevant programs, or do not have an effective approach. For example, Harvard Business Review states that 48% of managers are at risk of failure. This shocking statistic has various causes but reflects the fact that companies have lots of room for improvement in the design and implementation of a leadership development program.
This is one of the reasons why the Growthspace talent development platform was created: to solve the issue of inadequate methods for leadership development. The root cause of many failed leadership development initiatives is that they do not adequately identify the learning needs of specific individuals, and so cannot supply the correct development approach.
Growthspace resolves this with a technology that can recognize the granular development needs of leaders, from production line supervisors to senior executives. Growthspace’s proprietary technology breaks down leadership L&D requirements into elements. It then sources highly-regarded experts to provide coaching, mentoring, and training in those areas. Finally, Growthspace provides a simple evaluation method to assess the success of the expert and the L&D program’s effectiveness.
About Growthspace
Growthspace’s multi-experience L&D platform is changing the world of employee learning and development with a scalable, technology-based approach unlike any other. If you want to finally see what employee L&D programs can really do for your organization, contact us.
