Struggling with Leadership Development? You are Not Alone.

In 2020, the worldwide Leadership Development Industry was worth around 360 billion dollars and growing; today it's getting closer to 400 billion, with almost 45% of it being spent in the US alone. Yet, measuring leadership development and readiness over decades shows there has been little to no improvement. According to Gitnux Marketdata Report 2023:

• More than 80% of organizations are faced with a leadership talent shortage.
• Only 19% of organizations say they are “very effective” at developing leaders.
• 71% of organizations say their leaders are not ready to lead their business into the future.
• 94%  say that “leadership capabilities and effectiveness in a disrupted world” are important, but only 23%  feel their organization’s leaders are “ready to lead in a disrupted world.”

Consider 3 Key issues to improve your Leadership Development's efforts.

The vast majority of CEOs (90%) believe they are inefficiently spending valuable company resources on leadership development programs. With so much dissatisfaction, companies should review their efforts in leadership development and double-check whether the investment is really having the expected results. We can summarize three key aspects that account for much of the inefficiency and should improve:

First, one-size-fits-all approaches do not work. Some important design defects to check for:

1. Development programs are usually not based on an in-depth gap analysis that identifies specific critical skills that your leaders might be lacking. When content is generic, most leaders disconnect from the learning experience and behaviors are not challenged.
2. Every person is different. Whether they have a different learning approach, learning speed or personality traits, it always affects how the person understands and assimilates new habits. Most programs do not take this into account, creating ineffective results at best.

Second, there must be alignment with your company’s culture, strategy, and processes.

1. Your company’s ecosystem should play a huge role in program design. Leadership does not exist in a vacuum, what an “effective leader” means to your company might not be the same to others, even within the same industry. A detailed leadership profile is usually needed to improve results.
2. Leading requires support and reinforcement. Your top leadership team must be involved in the program, both as participants and mentors. The company’s communication style, decision-making approach, and openness to different ideas, play a huge role in the way leadership is developed. Being congruent with your company’s culture and processes is needed for a program to have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your leaders.
3. Your HR processes need to support what is expected of your leaders. This is a key aspect of creating a development experience that sticks. Reinforcing newly learned habits requires follow-up, measurements, and consequences. Leadership development programs are not a magic wand; alignment is critical for the learning process to be effective.

Third, 'how' to learn is as important as 'what' to learn.

Leadership can’t be really learned behind closed doors; the Emotional component of most complex leadership challenges is not easily reproduced in a classroom or seminar. You get leadership experience by being genuinely exposed to it.

1. Experience-based approaches are by far more effective than training sessions. You don’t learn to swim or fly an airplane by reading about it or watching videos. Programs that reinforce learning with real-life experiences allow participants to live the process and receive useful feedback.
2. Leaders should be actively involved in this process. Organizations, where leaders receive feedback from their managers on key skills, are 4.6x more likely to have high leader quality and bench strength compared to those that don’t.
3. Think twice about how “expensive” a program is. Going for the easy fix creates the illusion that you are investing in your leaders, but a cheaper program can end up being very costly. For every year a company delays leadership development, it costs 7% of its total annual sales.

Investing in leadership development is a must for every company, but an investment should have a return, and that needs to be the program’s focus: Creating leadership readiness. It is a process of adapting to the changing demands and expectations of the business environment, as well as the personal and professional growth of leaders and their followers. Leadership readiness is a dynamic and continuous journey that requires leaders to:

• Develop a growth mindset that embraces learning, feedback, and experimentation.
• Cultivate a sense of purpose and meaning that aligns with the organization’s vision, purpose, culture and values.
• Build trust and collaboration among diverse and inclusive teams and stakeholders.
• Balance task and relationship behaviors to achieve optimal results and engagement.
• Demonstrate emotional intelligence and resilience in the face of uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Inspire and empower others to lead and grow.

If you want to learn how to overcome the leadership development challenge, contact us today, so we can explore together how to turn development into a strategic capability and ensure long-term success.

Author: Javier Castillo

The Morphing Group®

Managing Partner USA

Top Teams Strategic Alignment | Leadership Effectiveness | Cultural Transformation | Talent Management | Organizational Flow | Employee Engagement

javier.castillo@morphing.guru

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Tampa, FL