Without sustainability, leadership development efforts will hinder organizational success.
About 73 million Baby Boomers are transitioning out of the workplace, signaling the critical need for new leadership. With years of only random investments in leadership development and succession planning, organizations find themselves with empty benches. It is no wonder that many organizations are investing in leadership development initiatives.
Further, recent industry surveys indicate that board members believe one of their strategic responsibilities is to ensure the continuity of effective leadership. If you Google “leadership development,” you will find millions of hits. Given the surge in popularity and the role in organizational success attributed to effective leadership, why are so many investments and efforts short-lived?
A strategic investment
Setting in motion and sustaining a leadership development investment is not a single event. It is a complex dynamic composed of many seemingly disparate components. Leadership development must be viewed as a critical, strategic investment.
Like any other strategic investment betting on the future, it is not without risks. Resources have to be redeployed from other priorities. That means the return must have as much impact or meaning as the returns expected from other priorities. Although it makes sense that as a strategic investment the full impact is often not recognized in the short term, there is invariably the challenge of keeping your impatient investors happy.
Based on successes across diverse settings and audiences—including global pharmaceutical and technology leaders at GE Healthcare, physicians and administrators in the academic healthcare environment of the Yale New Have Health System, and primary care physicians and specialists in the Virtua community hospital system—I have derived seven principles of sustainability:
- Speak to the experiences of your sponsors.
- Market the model with the rhetoric of your business.
- Have educators facilitate and managers educate.
- Use your business strategy as a compass and leader competencies as a rudder to navigate content decisions.
- Socialize the plan across your organization.
- Get help.
- Use more than numbers to measure success.
Speak to the experiences of your sponsors
During your design and development period, build rapport with all your stakeholders. Ask your senior leaders how they arrived at their position and level and what experiences had the most impact on their own development.
Your stakeholders initially will view any program or models you present through the lens of their own experiences, both good and bad. Be sure you know what those stakeholder experiences have been. The stronger the emotional connections you can make between your initiative and the experiences of your stakeholders, the more resonance and, ultimately, more influence you will have to advance your effort.
When you go public with the plan you want it to have a ring of familiarity. You must be able to say, with confidence, “I’ve talked to most of you.”
Market the model with the rhetoric of the business
At the risk of overstating the obvious, every organization resides within its own industry context. Economic and social issues, competitors, politics, and demographics conspire to create unique challenges. Do your homework and embed the case for leadership development within your unique context.
In the healthcare world, the prospect of reform generates much angst. Despite the industry’s best efforts to fully articulate specific impacts of reform, there remains a great deal of ambiguity. So speak in terms of equipping leaders to navigate change.
Choose venues that have cachet in your business. For example, hosting a program at the well-known learning center at Crotonville, New York, adds instant credibility for a GE audience. Within the Yale New Haven Health System, delivering a program in the Grand Rounds Amphitheater of the Yale Medical School helps place the prestige of the institution in the backdrop.
Have educators facilitate and managers educate
You can undoubtedly find leaders in your organization who get it, are doing it right, and are role models. Find them. Recruit them. Have your educators prepare them to be most effective in an instructional role.
Line managers on the instructional platform link the message to the realities of the business and tend to resonate well with their peer groups. They can speak directly to how new concepts and tools have helped them hurdle leadership challenges without incurring a response such as, “You don’t really know what it’s like.” They can be convincing without being perceived as preaching.
Use business strategy as your compass and leader competencies the rudder
The kinds of challenges related to growth, maintenance, consolidation, and redirection your leaders will face are foreshadowed by your strategy. Whether you build or buy a leader competency model, be sure it is closely aligned with your strategy. If not, the risk is a model that is only marginally useful because it lacks connection to the pain people feel and the potential that you seek to unleash.
The number of competency models commercially available is voluminous. Most models are built on either leader traits or leader behaviors, while some hybrid models have both traits and behaviors. Traits are more inspirational and easier to achieve consensus on, but behaviors are more granular and easier to identify and measure.
A systemic approach to leader development is strongly encouraged. That means that the competency model resides at the center of your human capital infrastructure. Leader development is the piece of infrastructure explored here.
Talent screening and acquisition, performance management, and rewards and recognition processes are other key components that must be linked interdependently to the competency model. It can help you navigate decisions about specific content for your leader program, screening criteria for prospective employees and evaluation dimensions for employee performance.
Socialize the plan
In addition to the compelling business case to leverage your investment in leadership development, you must prepare the organization for other tough choices necessary for success. Because you are working with finite resources, not every leader will have access to your development programs. Participation must be managed strategically. It is a top-down process. People will be excluded. Concerns about fairness and equal access will surface.
Differentiation and ranking are necessary in the vetting process because you are essentially betting on potential. You want to deploy your development resources toward those individuals from whom you predict will deliver the greatest contributions to the organization.
Betting on potential requires a tolerance for risk and trust. As people move through the development programs, your sponsors must trust that the process will work and be willing to risk placing people in new roles or meaningful assignments.
Trusting the development process without a willingness to make some risky moves stifles growth. Conversely, being risk tolerant without supporting the development process can cause people to fail in new roles.
Get help
Don’t be a champion of one. Build an ensemble cast. Create a strategy committee for training and development. Members of such a committee should include a handful of your most senior executives, including your CEO and others responsible for major areas of your business.
The strategy committee helps you garner endorsement from the owners of the resources and creates a cohort of powerful advocates. Through the committee you can distribute accountability across the organization. Perhaps most important—particularly in the area of leader development, which historically is viewed as a discretionary investment—is that with this ensemble cast you are in a better position to ensure relevance to the business.
Use more than numbers to measure success
Of course, citing numbers of participants, programs, deliveries, or hours of instruction provides informative pieces of information, but this kind of “nominal” measure does not address the question of impact, consequence, or return-on-investment. Further, asking participants how they felt about the development program, what they learned, or how they plan to change is interesting and hopeful, at best, but does not tie the development efforts to changes in the business.
Admittedly, return-on-investment in leadership development occurs, if at all, downstream. How do you mollify your impatient investors? Stories in the form of anecdotes are powerful levers. Anecdotes are real time, so roll them out in real time. They lose power when summarized as qualitative data at a later point in time.
Take every opportunity that presents itself to communicate the impact of the leader development experience through participants’ anecdotal reports. To be timely and effective with the anecdotes, you must stay close to the participants. Establish the expectation with participants that part of their ongoing obligation as recipients of significant development resources is to share with others their changes and progress.
Additionally, you have to build a robust process to track participants’ growth experiences. Every subsequent program increases the complexity and challenges of keeping abreast of individual impact.
There are two other levers to demonstrate impact worth considering. First, embed team projects as part of the development process. These are not simulations, but clearly scoped, current business challenges that demand attention and can be addressed by a small, multidisciplinary team. They can be considered group stretch assignments with a finite timeline (usually within 90 to 120 days). That timeframe allows the team to meet, research the problem, collect external benchmarks, and deliver recommendations to a panel of senior leaders.
Sample projects might include recommendations for refreshing an employee recognition program, identification of a percentage expense reduction in a particular area, or process improvement recommendations for a less than effective business process.
Finally, create the space in your leader development programs for participants to establish critical touch points that represent the underbelly, or the “what,” of networking. They are areas of common ground that individuals form with one another in a group experience. Addressing the process deliberately can be of help because a participant’s critical touch points can help broadcast and advocate observed changes and increased effectiveness of their colleagues, laying the groundwork for return-on-investment.
Apply relevancy
These seven principles are not new, nor are they particularly complex in and of themselves. The complexity and challenge exists in identifying the connections and aligning this seemingly disparate set of activities.
Mobilizing the commitment of the owners of your organization’s resources and building infrastructure that allows teams of people to support individual success ultimately demonstrate the relevance of your leader development investments. And with relevance comes sustainability.