Making a Paradigm Shift in Leadership Development

MAKING A PARADIGM SHIFT IN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

It may be necessary to rethink your criteria for selecting future leaders. The earlier you can catch someone on their leadership journey and get them to develop and practise the right behaviours, the more chance you will have of them developing the core leadership skills and mindsets you value. For example, it might be important for your business that leaders move away from a command and control style of leadership towards a coaching-based approach. How are you seeking to identify potential leaders in their early career who have a coaching orientation? How are you encouraging and promoting early-stage leaders who have the right mindsets and values? Are you casting the net wide enough – are the talent pools from which you recruit future leaders sufficiently diverse? One of the positive benefits of the pandemic has been an openness to trying out new working practices. In what ways can you harness that experimental mindset in the design of leadership interventions? Consider how you might harness the trends outlined in this research to update your methods for delivering leadership development. Have you got the balance right between virtual and in-person delivery? Are you clear about the outcomes you are looking to achieve from each intervention and which modes of learning are best suited to each outcome? Make sure there’s joined up thinking between learning, talent and resourcing. Consider how to use your internal talent marketplace to provide opportunities for high potential future leaders to work on business challenges that will both support their learning and address strategic business challenges. Are you prioritising action- doing rather than action-learning? Are the skills of your leadership development professionals up to date and suited to the leadership challenges for your business? How well do they understand your business strategy and what that means for leadership development? Are they up to speed with the latest technologies? Are they skilled in curating and packaging relevant content? Do they have the required facilitation and coaching skills? Do you have the right external partners on board to deliver the development you need?

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