Why You Need a Leadership Development Program
Investing in leader development has quickly become a high priority for many organizations this year. As the baby boomer generation continues to retire companies need employees with the right leadership skills to steer them through the future and the changes it will bring.
In 2019 77% of companies reported that they were already experiencing a leadership gap (1). This is concerning if you consider that leaders are needed to drive innovation and productivity throughout your company.
Leadership development is incredibly important when it comes to securing the future success of your business and developing your talent can provide many business benefits, but how do you optimize your program? How do you ensure that your leadership development program will deliver the maximum benefits for your company?
3 Tips to Delivering a Program That Delivers Big Business Benefits
There are many different factors that determine whether an employee training program is successful.
However, when it comes to leadership development the best in class programs tend to have three key factors in common. The gaps in employee performance are measured. The training objectives are aligned with the organizations business goals. The highest performing leadership programs use a blended training strategy.
To help you better understand how you can integrate each of these factors into your leadership development programs we have shared the details regarding each key factor below.
Measuring Performance Gaps
Creating a successful leadership training program starts with digging more deeply into the current state of the leadership pipeline. Measuring performance gaps and identifying areas for improvement is essential to developing a program that will provide business benefits.
This can be done by conducting surveys and by measuring employee performance. You can also talk to your senior managers and other employees to gather quantitative data about the current state of leadership and performance.
Once you identify the performance gaps you will be able to better align your leadership development program with your organizations needs.
Aligning Training Objectives With Business Goals
Once you identify the knowledge gaps in your current workforce you can then figure out which gaps need to be filled to help your organization reach it’s greater business goals. For example, an organization may find that they have a large number of new managers who need to learn specific leadership skills such as effective communication or negotiation in order to help their company reach its greater goal of achieving more sales.
Selecting specific training objectives that are aligned with business goals will help to create a more personalized learning experience for employees and will help keep the content relevant. This is incredibly important for today’s workforce as many employees today will lose interest quickly in content that they feel is generic or irrelevant.
Developing a Blended Program
Another key factor many organizations with successful leadership development programs have is that they use a blended learning design. With this strategy several different types of learning content are used as well as different content delivery methods.
A great example of this is where a company provides three different training methods each to support each other and enhance learning experiences. One leading organization in the life sciences industry implemented a leadership training program that used this 3 part structure.
The high potential leaders first completed a pre-work assignments to prepare them for a virtual instructor led training. They then followed up the training with a knowledge test and a meeting with their supervisors to develop a plan to apply what they had learned. They also had access to support materials they could reference during their day to day activities.
Approaching learning using a blended strategy and as a continuous process improves both the quality of the learning experiences provided and maximizes the long term results of the program.
To Conclude
Implementing the right leadership development strategy can help your organization unlock the potential of its employees and future leaders. According to a recent article by Forbes, leadership development is one of the key factors that drives profitability in businesses. This will help your organization gain resilience, increase productivity and boost your revenue which are all becoming increasingly important as the current economic landscape continues to change.
To learn more about how Infopro Learning has helped leading organizations create leadership development program that get results check out our case studies.
