Leadership development, a strategic priority!

We do see an increased focus on leadership development programs with bigger investments for most organizations. According to Harvard Business Review 2016, 70% of L&D professionals expect leadership development to become a strategic priority in the next three years. But to compare, only 47% of business managers agree on this.

Why do we have this rather big perception gap? Let’s add another statistic from the same paper. Only 19% of business managers strongly agree that their leadership development programs have a high relevance to the business issues they face.

This could explain the perception gap.

Leadership programs needs to change to support the escalating need for good leadership. We believe there are four points organizations need to cater for:

1. The programs need to make the training individualized. Most organizations do have leadership frameworks and other important tools to guide their leaders but there has to be a much stronger focus on the individual needs to implement the tools.

2. And the programs have to be much more contextualized. The leader needs to train much more in their day-2-day environment, and this makes the training more effective.

3. Make the trainings more “bite-sized”. To have the leader to train often and in smaller steps, to focus on the behavioral change, not just the content as such.

4. And if the training would show more measurable results, both for the individual and the organization, it would be more encouraging to invest both the time and money necessary.

Investing in leadership programs is definitely a strategic matter and the trainings need to be adopted to the new millennium leaders and their preferences.