Leadership development (LD) continues as a top-priority talent process for successful organizations, yet many of us still struggle to find efficient and effective ways to implement it as a competitive differentiator.
In fact, Brandon Hall Group’s just-completed LD research, Leadership: The State of Development Programs 2013, indicates that a mere 25.3% of organizations rated their Leadership Development programs as very effective or extremely effective. Equally concerning, almost 56 percent of organizations indicated that they have not yet defined a strategy to ensure their leadership capability drives achievement of business goals.
High performing organizations (HPOs) take a comprehensive approach to development for leaders at all levels, with a particular focus on high-potential leaders. In so doing, they rely on a pragmatic and scientifically based model such as our new High-Performance Integrated Leadership Development Framework, launched in accordance with this benchmarking research.
Our LD benchmarking research results validate the opportunity many organizations have to define a leadership strategy and redefine their development solutions in the context of leaders’ collaborative and global work.
Further, the data point to yet a third gap prevalent in many organizations: a faint LD budget. More than 60 percent of organizations report that their leadership development budget has stayed the same, or even shrunk, from the year prior. In HPOs, LD spending is never discretionary; it is a long-term investment (regardless of market/economic conditions) that will support the ongoing and sustainable performance of the business.
Like any longstanding investment, LD requires a consistent, continuing, and predictable spend. Anything less leaves organizations with — at best — individual development programs void of the strategic link to the business. This type of one-off programmatic approach to LD wastes critical resources, misaligns leader development with business goals, and misidentifies those with the greatest potential to lead the organization to sustained success.
More enterprises are looking for LD practices that have measurable impact on the way they make decisions, build teams, run their operations, grow their bench strength, and increase their profit margins. Our empirical LD benchmarking research is rich with leading LD trend data. Our LD Framework offers strategic guidance for institutionalizing highly effective LD. Taken together, they offer keen insights and guidance to those aspiring toward LD that makes a differentiating and measurable impact on the business.
Recognized as a leading expert in the field of talent management research and advisory services, Brandon Hall Group is pleased to make this distinguishing research and framework available to our clients. We invite you to spend some time with both and let us know how your organization’s approach to LD compares to our findings as distilled from the data shared with us from hundreds of global organizations of all sizes and from all industries.
You can reach me at [email protected]
