Leadership development plan
Ensure a steady pipeline of future leaders with a tailored leadership development plan. Enhance employee engagement and retention by focusing on essential leadership skills and competencies.
By Brad Nakase, Attorney
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What is the purpose of a leadership development plan?
Making sure your company has a solid pipeline of future leaders is possible with the help of a leadership development plan. Any organization’s ability to succeed and flourish over time is correlated with the leadership team’s ongoing development. Developing a strong plan for leadership development will help you lay out specific actions to find and develop your organization’s future generation of leaders.
A leadership development plan is a plan of action created to assist staff members in acquiring and refining their leadership skills. It also prepares them for positions of management and leadership within an organization.
Typically, this plan is long-term, structured, and tailored to the specific requirements of the company and the employee. It describes the learning objectives and tasks that an employee will do in order to meet their objectives.
Why make a leadership development plan?
Plans for leadership development are essential for maintaining company operations during difficult times and in cutthroat marketplaces. With this kind of arrangement, you may prevent your most valued employees from looking for other jobs with competitors and keep them engaged with the company. Furthermore, the more capable your executives are, the more likely your company will be to stand out from the competition and survive in a market that is changing all the time.
Prior to 2020, it was difficult to keep up with the velocity of change. However, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this transition to a rate that most people could not have imagined. The need for leaders to handle more significant crises, negotiate more ambiguity, and guarantee company continuity by digitizing processes was most prominently brought to light.
Whether they were previously acknowledged as such or not, many HR leaders actually served as strategic business partners. As to a recent survey conducted by the international research and consultancy firm Gartner, the following are the top five objectives for HR leaders in 2024:
- Building Important Skills and Qualifications – 68% of HR leaders consider this a priority
- Current and Future Leadership Bench: 44%
- Organizational Design and Change Management: 46%
- Work in the future: 28%
- Workplace Experience: 26%
Developing a plan for your staff members’ leadership development is linked to two of these priorities.
Developing Essential Competencies & Skills
As to the survey conducted by Gartner, HR leaders are unaware of the talent gaps that exist in their present workforce. Workflows among employees barely include learning in a meaningful way. Furthermore, they are unable to provide solutions for skill development quickly enough to satisfy the changing demands for skills.
The bench of today’s and tomorrow’s leaders
One of the issues raised by HR leaders in the Gartner poll is the lack of diversity in their leadership pool. Their succession management procedures struggle to produce effective midlevel executives because they don’t produce the right leaders at the right time.
The main objectives of your leadership development plan should be to create a diverse leadership pipeline and to develop critical leadership competencies.
Additionally, a plan like this encourages employee engagement and gives them chances for ongoing education.
How to draft a plan for leadership development
- Evaluate and recognize talent
Certain organizations possess official programs for developing leaders and talent pools from which they can choose individuals for specialized leadership development plans. On the other hand, some companies lack official methods for identifying or evaluating potential.
A straightforward 9 Box Grid is what we would suggest for those businesses. Potential, or future performance capability, is compared to performance, or current performance, using a 9 Box Grid. For a leadership development strategy, you should ideally choose High Potentials, Stars, and High Performers.
- Obtain support from important parties
Senior management, the superior or manager of the intended individual or employees, and the employee him or herself must all support a leadership development plan for it to be effective.
A leadership development plan frequently calls for a larger financial commitment from that worker. Usually, this entails setting aside money in order for it to succeed. Before moving forward, senior leadership would need to approve the budget. Senior Leadership may take the plan’s alignment with the organization’s strategic objectives into account before approving the budget. It is possible that the Senior Leadership would like to have the last say in deciding who gets to take part in the leadership development plan.
Participation from the manager or supervisor is also required in this process. This is because the targeted person could have to attend training sessions and take on more initiatives, which would divert their attention from their current work obligations. To gain more skills, they might also be temporarily transferred to a different team. The employee will feel conflicted by these conflicting demands, therefore this plan is unlikely to succeed unless the manager or supervisor has bought into it.
The intended employee or employees must likewise desire to take part in this plan. Even while it could seem like a fantastic chance, some employees might decide not to participate or would prefer to wait until a later time. The worker might not be interested in this, or it could be the result of other personal obligations. Despite having the potential to lead, not every employee aspires to hold a leadership role.
A effective leadership development plan must have consensus among the upper management, the manager/supervisor, and the individual regarding the goals of the plan, how they will be met, when they will happen, and who will be involved.
- Determine the style of leadership
Potential leaders may be expected to adhere to a specific leadership style inside the company. This could depend on the business requirements and culture of the organization. American Express Business Trends and Insights lists seven distinct leadership philosophies. Transformational leadership is an eighth approach that has been gaining popularity.
A company might favor one or more of these approaches. But given the unpredictability and volatility of today’s business environments, leaders must be able to perform well in a variety of settings, depending on the circumstance.
Although it may not come easily, this level of agility is a necessary ability that needs to be learned in the modern world. A flexible leadership style may be the most effective leadership approach required for guiding today’s talent, claims American Express Business Trends and Insights.
- Identify the essential leadership skills
An effective leadership development plan must identify the critical leadership abilities required for the organization’s present and future success. The developmental plan is built around these competencies. Developing them entails making sure the upcoming generation of leaders is prepared for both known and unidentified situations.
Right now, only 21 percent of HR leaders say colleagues share responsibility or collaborate with HR in assessing future skill needs, according to the results of a Gartner survey. Increased collaboration and shared responsibility with HR Leaders are necessary if we are to be prepared for another year like 2020.
Leadership competencies are divided into three divisions, as defined by SHRM:
- Qualities needed to lead the company
- Proficiency in overseeing others
- Capabilities for self-leadership
Three more competencies are worth mentioning as well:
Cultural Intelligence (CQ): It assesses a leader’s capacity to interact and function well in contexts with varying cultural norms. It is the motivation, expertise, and approach that leaders use to comprehend and integrate into various cultures in order to meet organizational goals. Leaders must be culturally competent since both stakeholders and companies are growing increasingly diverse. Establishing a varied, equal, and inclusive environment requires leaders to possess fundamental cultural intelligence and competence.
Digital Intelligence (DQ): The sum of social, emotional, and intellectual skills that allow people to face obstacles and cope with the demands of digital existence is what the DQ Institute defines as digital intelligence (DQ). DQ also entails understanding customers and their usage of your mobile site, app, or website, and then using this data to improve their experience regardless of the time, location, or mode of interaction with you. Digital intelligence is the capacity to convert digital information into immediate, practical, customer-centric insights in today’s mobile, multi-device, and multi-channel environment.
Agility: According to Comstock and Raz’s 2018 book “Imagine It Forward,” good leaders withstand the unexpected shocks and stress in times of extreme change. These times of drastic change can be used by capable leaders to grow their companies. Resilience, teamwork, and curiosity are just a few traits that set the Agile Leader apart, according to the Forbes Coaches Council.
- Evaluate essential leadership skills
The company must evaluate the chosen individual or employees in comparison to the stated important leadership competencies in order to comprehend the scope of the leadership development plan. The assessment’s findings will indicate the employee’s areas of competency deficiency. After that, make use of these gaps to determine and/or provide the best possible learning opportunities for the staff member to close such gaps.
- Create the plan for leadership development.
To provide the best possible learning opportunities for your staff, confer with the subject matter experts in Learning & Development at your company. To give the employee a rich learning environment, include as many of the educational solutions as you can from the list below:
- Self-paced microlearning: Akin to Google Grow and LinkedIn Learning.
- Complementary leadership mentoring: Connects future leaders with leaders who do well in the skills they lack.
- Job shadowing: This gives the worker a thorough knowledge of the workings of a company. It offers a chance to network with important contacts and gain insight into the difficulties encountered in the workplace.
- Job rotation: The worker takes on new responsibilities for three to six months, usually on a temporary basis.
- Professional development courses: Often two to three days of off-site instruction for a certain aptitude or skill.
- Professional certifications: In order to function in specific roles and be respected by their colleagues, employees may need to get and uphold professional credentials.
Naturally, this is not a complete list. The learning tactics should be combined in a way that supports your staff members in achieving their objectives.
The Gartner report suggests that organizations use a dynamic strategy to reskilling and reassigning talent. This involves collaboration across all involved stakeholders to identify changing skill demands and devise strategies for skill development at the appropriate moment. Employees who use the dynamic method to reskilling apply seventy-five percent of the new skills they learn—much more than those who use other approaches—and learning starts earlier since needs are detected more quickly.
- Perform ongoing 360-degree evaluations of leadership
You want to know whether the goals and effectiveness of your leadership development plan are being met. For this reason, you must devise a system for tracking the employee’s development during a leadership development plan and evaluating their preparedness once it has been completed.
A 360-degree evaluation of leadership from important stakeholders is one method. The success of both the worker and the plan is ensured by ongoing interaction and feedback. Participation throughout the process offers the chance to modify the plan’s goals to instantly reflect organizational changes. In the end, the worker emerges as the leader the company needs.
Obstacles in developing a plan for leadership development
A leadership development plan’s successful implementation could face some difficulties. As an example:
- Restricted resources, like a set spending limit and time allotment.
- Insufficient dedication from the company’s leadership, executives, and staff, as well as the absence of a learning culture overall.
- Unable to provide solutions for skills development quickly enough to satisfy changing skill requirements.
- Activities and programs for succession management that are ineffective and do not generate the right kind of leaders.
On the other hand, by being aware of the difficulties, leaders can take proactive measures to prevent any roadblocks to the plan’s effective execution.
One last thing
Leaders in HR and business will have to catch up with all the changes brought forth by COVID-19. To overcome these problems, leaders must, nevertheless, move forward by implementing tried-and-true procedures, abandoning those that are out of date, being more flexible, and developing digital and cultural intelligence.
Above all, leaders need to remember that their staff members and the next generation of leaders depend on them to be prepared for the challenges that lie ahead. They are excited about the opportunities that present themselves during times of crisis, even though they are intimidated by the instability of the times.
Make an investment in your future leaders by creating leadership development plans and making sure the necessary competencies are recognized and acquired quickly.
Have a quick question? We answered nearly 2000 FAQs.
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