It is estimated that every year, companies in the US alone spend approximately $166 billion on leadership development. The global market for leadership development is estimated to be worth over $366 billion.
However, if every business was being led by a bunch of effective and capable leaders, the global business scenario would look very different.
This clearly means that some leadership development programs are better than the others.
So what makes a leadership development program effective enough to actually produce remarkable leaders?
Let’s look at some obvious and important but often overlooked aspects of leadership development programs.
Relevance
Who are you training? Who will they become after training? What responsibilities will they be expected to handle? What decisions will they be expected to make?
When you know the answers to these questions, you will be able to determine exactly what your leadership development curriculum should cover.
Remember that organisational leaders also have specialisations and departments. Think about who the leaders of those departments should be and then think about what skills your best employees need to become one of those people.
If the training is not relevant, the learners will not be enthusiastic about it. Not to forget, irrelevant training will only produce incapable leaders.
Continuous Learning Culture
One common mistake that many businesses make with leadership development is that they fail to associate a definitive timeline with their efforts. This results in slow and often ineffective development of leadership skills.
That’s why, advice about restricting formal leadership training to a specific window of time is commonly found in articles about the subject.
While it is good advice, limiting your formal instruction does not mean your leaders will stop learning. Let’s face it, as important as formal training is, leaders are not created in a year or two.
To support the development of your leaders and to help them stay relevant in the overwhelmingly dynamic business environment of today, you must instill a continuous learning culture in your organisation’s training efforts, as well as in its leaders.
For instance, the current pandemic has accelerated our journey towards a “distance economy”. The future workplace will look very different from the current one and future leaders will require excellent communication and collaboration skills to enable distributed teams to function in tandem.
Measurability
Measuring the success of any training program is one of the best ways to improve its effectiveness, and leadership development is no exception.
However, measuring the ROI of leadership development can be tricky. Besides measuring the knowledge and testing the new skills of your leaders, you must also collect detailed reports about levels of productivity, along with surveys about how they are being received across the organisation.
Testing these parameters can turn out to be a complex undertaking. However, the resultant data and the insight it will provide in optimising your leadership development efforts for improved productivity will be nothing short of priceless.
Conclusion
Leadership development differs from all the other forms of employee training. Besides being significantly more expensive, developing effective leaders also requires a personalised approach. With that said, when the right amount of personalisation is combined with relevant formal training and a continuous learning culture, the impact of leadership development can be improved dramatically.
What are the challenges you face with leadership development at your organisation? Share them with us in the comment section below!
