Whether you are a new leader learning the ropes or it’s your responsibility to develop leaders in your organization, it is a massive responsibility.
Organizations often take high-performing individuals and promote them to leadership or managerial positions because they excelled in their previous roles. While there’s nothing wrong with this, organizations also need to provide opportunities for new and veteran leaders alike to gain the skills needed to succeed in leadership-specific roles. They need the skills to get work done through and with other people. They need to know how to manage people, and people are complicated.
Without proper skill development, a leader can quickly experience burnout and high levels of dissatisfaction, which can greatly impact the engagement of their employees. Luckily, taking small steps to build leadership development can bring great rewards.
What Is Leadership Development?
Leadership development is a comprehensive process that cultivates an individual’s ability to effectively guide teams, make strategic decisions, and drive organizational success through enhanced self-awareness and people management skills.
While learning and development (L&D) refers broadly to everything an employee needs to do their job effectively, including technical and tactical training, leadership development addresses all of that and more. Instead of simply working toward providing training on specific skills to equip people with the tools they need for their role, leadership development dives more into the behavioral and psychological realms.
These questions are often explored during leadership development:
- Who am I as a person and a leader?
- What behaviors do I need to exhibit?
- How do I facilitate the work of others?
- How does my personality impact my impulses as a leader?
- What does my team need, and how can I fill those gaps?
At its core, leadership development is ultimately focused on helping people expand the skills needed to manage people and projects, like team management, decision-making, building interpersonal connections, developing strategies, exercising innovation, and more.
Why Is Leadership Development Important?
Leadership development is crucial for organizational success because it creates capable, energetic leaders who drive employee engagement, foster innovation, and give companies a competitive edge. Developing capable, energetic leaders helps to attract and retain top talent, both within leadership and otherwise.
When people respect their leaders and feel supported by them, they are more likely to stay and invest valuable time in an organization. If leaders themselves feel supported, they are likewise more likely to stay. In this way, leadership development comes down to ensuring people have the tools they need to keep others engaged.
Investing in leadership development can deliver many measurable results across the organization, including:
- Accelerating the development of high-potential employees.
- Strengthening succession planning and internal promotion pipelines.
- Improving decision-making at all organizational levels.
- Increasing adaptability to change and market disruption.
- Enhancing cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing.
- Building stronger client and stakeholder relationships.
- Creating a more cohesive organizational vision and strategy.
Psychological Safety: A Key Result of Great Leadership
Another benefit of quality leadership development is that it can greatly impact overall company culture. It benefits people and organizations on multiple levels, from individuals and their teams to the entire organization, customers, and other stakeholders.
Having leaders who can build and maintain great team cohesion, engagement, and retention creates the conditions necessary for psychological safety. When people feel psychologically safe in their work environment, they feel they have the freedom and opportunity to take risks, be innovative, and embrace their creativity. Over time, this culminates in less employee turnover and more satisfied, high-performing employees, making achieving organizational goals and objectives much easier.
6 Steps to Develop Leadership in the Workplace
Developing a leadership development plan in the workplace can seem daunting. However, following just a few key steps can greatly transform your people and your leaders.
Define Good Leadership
Progress can only begin if everyone uses a common definition. To uncover what leadership might specifically mean for your organization, ask these questions:
- Where do you see leaders most in your company?
- What responsibilities do these leaders have?
- Is leadership a key pillar in your organization’s mission or vision?
- What characteristics do your most valued leaders have in common?
Sometimes, what leadership is for an organization is spelled out explicitly in a mission statement or something similar. Sometimes it’s not, and the sense of importance around leadership is implicitly woven into company culture. If, however, the role of leadership is not yet fully explained, be sure to take the time to consider what a good leader looks like for your organization. People need to know what to aim for.
Identify Who Your Leaders Are
Once you define what good leadership means for you, you can identify who your leaders are. It may be very clear who your leaders are based on how you have organized your people, but remember that not all leaders are in managerial positions or are people leaders.
You may have great leaders who do not have reports but are instead responsible for managing great projects, extensive collaboration, and leading themselves. These “leaders of self” are highly valuable and deserve leadership development opportunities as well.
Decide What Success Looks Like
Before establishing effective and achievable development goals for your leaders, start small and begin by defining what success is for you. This will look different depending on your company and specific goals. Still, many organizations decide to establish success early on by reaching a certain number of people with a specific training program. Others may define success as increased engagement, while others may define it as something else. In any case, think through your purpose for providing leadership development and consider ways to track it.
Introduce a Framework
The goal of all good leaders is to facilitate engagement and performance, and it’s important to have language and a guide for thinking about what that is and how it’s achieved. There are numerous frameworks and models for thinking about leadership and engagement; we at GP Strategies have developed our own popular model, known as The X Model of Engagement.
The X Model explains how employees can experience maximum satisfaction and maximum contribution simultaneously, resulting in maximum engagement, which benefits individuals, teams, and the organization.
Introducing ways of thinking to leaders and employees about overall performance objectives will provide everyone with a common vocabulary to use as a benchmark.
Begin Offering Small Development Opportunities
Initially, you do not need every cutting-edge platform or type of learning opportunity. The goal should be to provide development and training opportunities that fit into the flow of work and meet people at their learning need.
Scalability is another important consideration when choosing what kind of opportunities to provide. Can what you provide your leaders be adjusted so it is as relevant for that new manager as it is for a veteran leader of self?
Beyond formal development opportunities, simply bringing people together can have a massive impact on engagement. Arranging common readings of professional development books, hosting lunch-and-learns, and promoting mentorship programs are simple activities to organize that can greatly impact leaders and employee engagement.
Measure Leadership Development Outcomes
Deciding how to measure outcomes is a critical step of the planning process, and determining the best way to do it can feel elusive to many—so elusive, in fact, that some people don’t even attempt to measure outcomes at all. However, tracking progress is crucial and provides opportunities to make calculated adjustments later. Some organizations choose to piggyback off existing HR metrics, some decide to conduct surveys, and others develop entirely new systems for tracking leadership development results.
The best place to start is to consider what you already measure and whether or not leadership development may impact any of those metrics. You can always develop more complex systems to assess the effectiveness of your leadership development initiatives down the line.
Creating Leadership Development Goals
After you have a basic system in place to develop the leaders within your organization, your goals should shift toward optimizing the experience. Develop new goals as you introduce new programs or initiatives and the metrics that align with them. Consistently revisit what you are working toward and ensure that those goals align with your organization’s overall objectives and what your leaders need to thrive.
To help create a cutting-edge leadership development program that is scalable and aligned with your organizational objectives and cultivates high-performing teams, reach out to GP Strategies and discover how a workforce transformation partner can make this process as rewarding as possible.
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