Leadership development is one of the biggest concerns of high growth organizations today — the complexity of the work environment and the constant fight for talent requires great management skills, especially from the low-mid level managers of the organization that directly impact the majority of the workforce. This phenomenon led these companies to focus on developing the next generation of leaders. According to data from the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, nearly 95% of learning organizations either plan to increase or maintain their current investment in leadership development. Yet, several large-scale industry studies, including Harvard business review indicates that more than 50% of the senior managers believe that their talent development efforts don’t adequately build critical skills and organizational capabilities.
Over the past few months, our team has interviewed more than 50 HR leaders, organizational development experts, and C-level managers trying to understand what are the major problems with the existing leadership development efforts that companies make today.
Management courses — only a good start
Almost all the companies we interacted with, send their fresh managers to outsourced management programs of different vendors. The course length for junior management is usually 3 months long on a weekly basis. Some of the companies change the course syllabus a bit in order to fit the company’s management culture better, but usually, it’s pretty generic. These programs are doing a really great job in educating the young leaders with the fundamentals of modern management — how to conduct one-on-one talks with employees, how to set team goals and simulating simple management dilemmas. After the program ends, the managers come back to their reality, equipped with some management techniques but lack of experience.
Scalability issues with in-house coaching
In-house leadership coaching and mentoring is one of the most effective solutions for developing a new manager — the coach knows the company personas and work-style, hence s/he can provide the manager with practical tips and feedback. In most of the companies, the role of coaching is shared between the manager’s manager and the department’s HR Business Partner. In practice, it’s not always possible to sustainably invest the required time in each one of the managers, especially when the company is in hyper-growth mode. Our interviewees indicated an average of once in a month for a one hour dedicated coaching meeting with their manager or with the HR specialist. We also noticed that usually, coaching frequency increases in complicated situations such as severe problems in the team.
Feedback surveys — low frequency, high bias
The team feedback is a crucial factor for the manager’s improvement, especially for junior managers, that oftentimes don’t know to spot their own weaknesses and create the correlation between the symptoms of inexperience and the outcomes for their teams. Almost all the companies we interviewed conduct a yearly 360 review that anonymously surveys colleagues, senior managers, and employees for feedback on the managers in the company. The survey is analyzed by the HR department and feedback is shared with the manager by the HR business partner. In many cases, it raises issues for improvement that the manager was not aware of, such as the skill of showing appreciation for good work or low availability for employees. The first problem with these surveys is the low frequency that does not allow quick improvement cycles, the other is the bias of the data either because employees don’t believe that the survey is truly anonymized or just because they don’t feel comfortable to write the painful truth about their manager.
So what’s the future?
We at DUX believe that managers should own their progress and development, but for that, they need the right tools — high-frequency feedback and an ongoing personalized path for improvement. Our workplace is becoming more and more digital — we collaborate, engage and manage using various digital platforms. This digitization has brought up a new type of data that can be utilized to analyze work behavior, collaboration patterns and much more — this is exactly where we see an opportunity.
Our mission is using the power of AI and behavioral science in order to build a self-service platform for the manager, providing him with constant feedback and tools for improvement such as practical insights and bites of microlearning content, turning management coaching to personalized, scalable and data-driven.
We are at the beginning of our journey, please feel free to reach out and take part in this thrilling adventure. More updates to come.
