Many organizations have leadership development programs; however, research by Harvard Business Publishing states that only 7% of businesses describe their leadership development programs as best-in-class. This statistic means that a majority of the enterprises overlook the criticality of implementing these programs to offer their employees a clear roadmap to management roles.
Delivering top-notch leadership training requires you to equip leaders with specific skills and behaviour they need to effectively lead others and drive the performance of their team or organization. Said that, here’s a list of 4 necessary steps that should be taken for a comprehensive leadership development program.
Understand Your Company’s Leadership Needs
As a good practice, you should always think about any specific leadership gaps your organization might have. For instance, you can check if any leaders are retiring soon. If the answer is yes, then look for the attributes and characteristics that your company would miss. Secondly, think about the short-term and long-term strategic goals of your company.
Work On Change Management
An organization cannot come to a halt all of a sudden, as it is not a static entity. Factors like employee turnover, company growth, changes in the marketplace, and others contribute to ongoing changes in an organization. Leaders must ensure their preparedness to manage the changes before they even happen. Any leadership development program should include change management training at its core. It will ensure the leaders to harness the power of vision and demonstrate strong leadership at the right time.
Look Out For Potential Leaders
Identifying potential leaders within your company can be a challenging task. Many organizations make a common mistake with leadership development programs by focusing only on top-performing employees. It doesn’t make someone a leader simply because that individual has demonstrated outstanding work in their domain. Keep your mind open and develop a mentality to look beyond the most obvious employees. Invite promising employees from other departments within your organization for engaging in the leadership development program.
It should be your priority to develop the skills and confidence of your employees so that they can make progress as their career ladder goes up. It is absolutely fine if some of the employees are happy to stay in their current jobs or prefer a different path that eliminates their chances to make it to the management level. In such instances, they can be leaders in other ways. You must ensure that all employees know the leadership development opportunities available in your organization and can take benefits from them.
Focus on Employee Retention:
Leadership development programs are similar to long-term staffing strategies in many ways. You can identify and nurture talented employees who hold the potentiality of remaining in key management positions in the future.
One of the strategies you can think of is by offering compensation to promising employees to match their developing skills. You can also hold frequent face-to-face meetings with the potential employees to ensure that they are satisfied with their career path. Alternatively, you can also make a positive impact on employee retention by deploying employee rewards system, where your employees can earn incentives like extra leaves, appreciation letters from the top management for specific achievements, and much more.
In Conclusion
A fresh approach to training and development is required to close the gap between good leadership and the sad reality of unsuccessful leadership programs. It is advised to consider the challenges of your company and the requirements of leaders, and approach the current leaders for inputs. These will help you in creating a successful leadership development program. With the various strategies listed here, we are sure that you can conduct leadership training smoothly and develop the leadership skills in your employees.
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