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How to Make Leadership Development Relevant and Effective
Developing leaders who can navigate today's business challenges is more critical than ever. Success requires a practical approach that grounds learning in current organizational needs and empowers leaders to drive change. Here are six keys to creating leadership development programs that are not only relevant but also spread virally throughout the organization.
1. Secure an Executive Sponsor
Leadership development initiatives that appear to originate solely from HR are often doomed from the start. To ensure company-wide impact, it is essential to have an internal sponsor with clout, preferably the CEO or one of their direct reports.
Keep this sponsor fully engaged by:
- Involving them in the design, development, and delivery of the program.
- Contracting with them often on strategy and progress.
- Sharing impact measures and outputs that help them advocate for the program.
2. Focus on the Now
To be relevant, leadership development must address the top issues and problems your company is facing right now. The business landscape changes too quickly to focus on challenges that are three to five years away. To identify the most pressing issues, involve your executive sponsor and other senior leaders, but also engage with employees who are closer to the action.
3. Promote Cross-Functional Dialogue
Once a key issue is identified, bring together a group of 10 to 30 senior leaders and employees who are wrestling with it. Facilitate a full-day session where they can dialogue, debate, and teach each other. The success of this hinges on careful selection of participants; involve your CEO and sponsor to identify thought leaders who can contribute meaningfully to the discussion.
4. Describe, Don’t Prescribe
Expose your leaders to new ideas, models, and principles, but do not prescribe specific answers. Allow them to work through how they will apply what they are learning to their own departments or business units. This approach fosters a crucial sense of ownership and accountability for the outcomes.
5. Make the Learning Viral
In a rapidly changing environment, gradual change isn't enough. Learning must become viral. By planting the right seeds with key thought leaders, their new thinking can spread laterally and vertically across the company. Viral learning is a natural outcome when leaders have genuinely embraced new insights, which is why relevance and a non-prescriptive approach are so important.
6. Hold Leaders Accountable
Effective development requires a commitment to action. Ask your leaders to identify:
- What they are learning.
- How they will put their learning into practice.
- What their specific goals and timeframes are for implementation.
Discuss these conclusions with them, provide feedback, and then follow up to hold them accountable for achieving the standards they have set for themselves.
Conclusion
While executing these ideas requires both art and science, the path to more effective leadership development is clear. By keeping your programs relevant, practical, viral, and real, you can build a leadership corps capable of meeting any challenge. '''