Program Leadership Development equips current business leaders and future ones with the skills needed to succeed. It fosters a more dynamic and productive work environment, nurtures stronger relationships, and enhances organizational performance and profitability.
Defining your organization’s goals and the leadership competencies needed to support those objectives should shape the structure and content of a leadership learning program. Contact Ripple Effect Culture for professional help.
When creating a leadership development program, it’s important to start with your business priorities in mind. What do you need your leaders to do differently in order to support your current strategic goals? This will help you shape the structure, content, and measurement of your learning experience.
For example, if your priority is to create a culture of inclusion and equity, an effective leadership development program might include content that builds empathy, fosters communication skills, or helps leaders understand how different perspectives can impact decision-making. This can help your leaders build a diverse workforce, which is an essential element of cultural and organizational success.
Having an established list of business priorities will also help you decide which leadership competencies to focus on during your program. For example, you may want to develop your leaders’ ability to engage employees and keep them motivated despite challenges. This can be achieved by developing the right mindset, increasing self-awareness, and fostering an environment of innovation and continuous improvement. A leadership development program that helps your leaders develop these skills can improve employee retention and increase overall engagement, which ultimately leads to higher financial value for the company.
After identifying your business priorities, you can then set success indicators to measure at the beginning and end of your program. These can be qualitative or quantitative, and should have clear methods and sources of measurement. For example, success indicators might include learner participation in your program, the number of times your learners apply new skills on the job, and business impact. It may take months before you see some of the quantitative business metrics, but program engagement and application data can often be assessed immediately.
Defining Your Program’s Purpose
The next step in establishing an effective leadership development program involves identifying the company’s goals and how they align with the needed leadership competencies. This helps create a clear understanding of the skills the organization needs from its leaders to achieve those objectives, and can guide the program’s curriculum and training framework.
Then, it’s time to begin identifying potential leaders within the organization. This can be done through performance evaluations, competency assessments and conversations with managers and supervisors. It’s also important to include a variety of learning opportunities in the program, such as classroom-based learning, on-the-job training and virtual instructor led training (vILT) alongside eLearning, mentoring and coaching.
As a result, the leadership training should be highly customized and geared towards meeting each leader’s specific needs. This will help to ensure that the content is relevant and meaningful to the individual, making it more likely they’ll learn from it.
It’s also important to set clear milestones for the participants in your program, so they have a sense of what success looks like. But be careful not to make the goals too difficult, or employees may not be motivated to work toward them because they will feel discouraged if they fail. Instead, set measurable but realistic goals that are challenging and aspirational at the same time.
Providing future leaders with the opportunity to learn new leadership skills and gain experience in different roles is one of the best ways to help them become great managers for your business, and reduce the attrition that often results from poor management. In fact, research shows that managers account for up to 70% of employee engagement, and a good manager can have a major impact on an employee’s decision to stay with their current employer, or look elsewhere for a new role.
Identifying Your Targeted Leaders
Leaders are the glue that holds your organization together, and they play a huge role in employee engagement and retention. Studies show that leadership is 70% learned and 30% genetic, so companies can unlock the potential of current management while preparing the next generation of leaders.
Whether you’re looking to train leaders on the job or create a leadership development program, you need a clear understanding of your business priorities and how they align with the capabilities and training needs of your current leaders. This clarity will help you define the leadership behaviors you need to target and ensure that your program delivers real results.
If your company’s goal is to grow revenue and profitability, it’s essential that your leaders have the skills necessary to motivate and inspire employees. Leaders that are highly engaged are more likely to drive positive customer experiences and deliver higher performance. This is why it’s important to identify your top-performing leaders and understand what leadership traits they have in common. Leadership development programs can help you identify and nurture these high-performing leaders, allowing them to grow into their full potential, ultimately driving better business outcomes for your organization.
A good leadership development program will also provide access to a variety of learning opportunities that are designed to be engaging, effective and flexible. As attention spans have shortened and workers are pulled in more directions than ever, the right learning experiences should be available at any time and place to engage employees.
This may include microlearning, which provides bite-sized leadership training content that can be accessed and consumed on demand; mentoring and coaching; and even immersive experiences like simulation exercises and on-the-job developmental assignments or shadowing. It’s also critical to have a centralized platform that collects and analyzes data on your current leaders and those who are displaying leadership potential so you can make data-driven decisions about your program’s success indicators and measurable goals.
Creating Success Indicators
Many organizations rely on leadership development to enable their strategy. They realize that leader capabilities like strategic thinking and preparing for uncertainty are directly linked to critical business outcomes, such as revenue growth. Consequently, these skills are top priorities for leaders. But the problem is, companies often delay leadership development in order to focus on other business priorities, mistakenly believing that their investments won’t impact near-term results. But that’s the wrong approach. Leadership development enables leaders to understand the connection between their own behaviors and company performance, and it gives them a solid understanding of how to drive change in the organization.
When designing a leadership program, it’s essential to identify potential participants and target their specific needs. It’s important to scout beyond the obvious choices—top performers, for example—and find those who have a passion for learning and the ability to rise to new challenges. A good training program will also foster practical experience and build leadership capability by providing opportunities to apply learning in a real-world setting, such as on-the-job developmental assignments, mentoring or shadowing.
A measurable, clear-cut set of success indicators will help you track your progress and assess the effectiveness of your program. These can be both quantitative and qualitative in nature, and you should have a plan for how to collect the data necessary to determine your success. Depending on the length of your program, it may be months before you can see concrete results in the form of quantitative business metrics such as revenue increase. However, you can use a number of different data points to gauge learner satisfaction and leadership capability.
The last thing you want to do is over-program. Too much content will overwhelm the learners, and if they feel they are receiving training that is not relevant to their work, they will quickly lose interest. A good leadership program will tailor the learning content for each individual participant, so that it is highly relevant to their business needs.
Setting Goals
Setting goals is a key component to success in any endeavor, and leadership development is no different. Setting clear and measurable goals for a leadership program ensures that it delivers on the business priorities you identified and helps participants feel engaged with the initiative.
Using a goal setting process, set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. These SMART goals help leaders visualize what they need to do to achieve their desired outcomes. They also make it easier to see how their goals fit into the company’s overall vision and goals.
It’s important to keep in mind that while achieving the goals of your leadership development program is crucial, it won’t be motivating unless they’re tied to bigger organizational aims. A good way to do this is by ensuring that your objectives are communicated to all of your employees. Using the resources in your communication tool of choice—like internal meetings, company newsletters, or social media posts—is one way to do this.
Another way to tie your leadership development program’s goals to business priorities is through the content and design of the initiative. Leadership development programs are most effective when they focus on performance outcomes that support a particular business priority, like revenue growth. Additionally, they’re most engaging when the learning content is highly relevant to the learner.
A leader development program that supports the company’s current and future needs should incorporate a variety of learning methodologies. This could include in-person or online instruction, mentoring and coaching, or immersive experiences like on-the-job development assignments or shadowing. Using these diverse approaches can ensure that your leadership development program is a holistic and well-rounded experience for all of your leaders.