Effective Leadership Development Programs

This article was co-authored by Christine Roach and Pamela Hooper.

The Importance of Implementing an Effective Leadership Development Program

Every CEO would agree that strong leaders are important for their business. Despite this, many businesses lack formalized leadership development programs to develop those leaders, while others who have some form of a program in place adopt one-size-fits-all approaches that don’t address what their organization and employees really need to support long-term success and build competitive advantage.

In this post, we examine the importance of having an effective leadership development program, differences between reactive and proactive approaches to leadership development, and why tailored development programs deliver far more value than generalized training.

Reactive vs. Proactive Leadership Development

Leaders are typically hired with an expectation that they possess the skill sets they’ll need to perform their duties. If they apply those skills the same way they did in previous organizations, the result may be very different and potentially result in undesired outcomes. It’s important to acclimate and develop leaders on how needed skills are most successfully applied in your organization. They have to tie their approach to the why of your unique market and operating variables, company mission and values, and overall strategy. Developing and preparing leaders to work this way requires a proactive and planful approach.

Leadership development programs sway to the reactive side of the spectrum when they’re mostly born out of isolated fires related to adverse events. Such events could be anything from a one-off retention issue to a behavioral concern that triggered a painful employee investigation. Training and development have a place and a value in reactive instances like these, but simply sending every employee to narrowly focused training tied to such events won’t get overall employee performance and capability where you want it to be.

In contrast, leadership development is proactive when framed through the perspective of growth and succession planning. Looking forward through this lens, you can identify new and/or enhanced skills and ways of working that your employees are going to need to unlock higher performance, advance key business objectives, and support individual career growth. Proactive leadership development articulates the gold standard of skills and behaviors across all levels of leadership, identifies gaps across that spectrum, and puts the right combination of content and delivery in place to lift leadership capability and organizational impact. Benefits typically include a mix of:

• enhanced decision-making, strategic thinking, communication, and conflict resolution
• greater effectiveness in motivating teams, driving results, and managing change
• stronger employee engagement, retention, and employment experiences, and
• increased innovation through collaborative problem-solving and comfort in sharing ideas

Leadership Development that’s Less “Off-the-Shelf” and More “Just for Us”

Organizations embark on leadership development program implementation paths from very different places. Some may not know where to start or lack internal bandwidth to get a program moving. Some may have undertaken self-administered assessment tools like Clifton Strengths, DISC, or similar to identify relative strengths and weaknesses across their teams but then aren’t sure what programmatic elements to put in place to address them.

As a result, many organizations or HR functions attempt to address these issues by opting for “canned” pre-packaged seminars, conferences, and other generalized leadership programs. These types of programs do hold some benefit, but almost always yield low across-the-board average impact for participants and even less stickiness with respect to shifting norms. A far better approach is to secure fractional HR expertise that can help you form and facilitate a leadership development program that’s carefully tailored to your company’s needs and leadership profiles. Here’s what that looked like for one vcfo client.

This organization operates across multiple markets with leaders that span the breadth of those respective geographies. The physical distance separating these leaders was one of several factors contributing to siloed work, a lack of collaboration, and suboptimal communications amongst the group. The communications issues also led to mixed messages downstream to employees that reported up to these leaders. To contend with these factors and address the range of alignment issues the organization was dealing with, vcfo customized a leadership development series centered on content from the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” Components of the program included:

• Sequenced weekly sessions allowing for session-to-session adjustments to address learning styles and individual needs
• Virtual format to accommodate participants and mimic the organization’s natural working mediums
• Specific ice breakers designed to encourage vulnerability and build trust among participants who often operated independently
• Short-story excerpts that considered reader/non-reader preferences and teed up dialogue on specific issues the team was facing
• Course outline identified content excerpts, learning objectives, takeaways, and resources related to each objective
• Recorded CEO messaging to ensure consistency across participants and enable wider use of consistent messaging in areas such as employee onboarding

The external relationship of the facilitators helped to mitigate internal biases, introduce new perspectives, and create a space of psychological safety where participants gained comfort in expressing concerns and vulnerability. Facilitation also fostered inter-participant dialogue to get the group talking and learning from each other versus the listen-and-learn nature of lecture-centric training. The executive sponsor reported that the leadership development program brought a new level of open communication, collaboration, and trust amongst the leadership team that’s making a positive impact in their organization and changing their culture.

Leadership Development that Delivers Results

The success and growth of any business is largely determined by how well that business can prepare and grow its leaders’ abilities to take on the challenges they face today and those they’ll face moving forward. Take steps to remove reactive approaches to leadership development from your company’s climate and move toward making proactive leadership development a part of your culture. At the same time, opt less for generalized one-size-fits-all training formats. Instead, engage your leaders in tailored leadership development programs purposefully designed to address identified skill gaps and better prepare them for the future.  

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