Managing Constant Changes and adapting to Business reorganization are the main challenges for Leaders who need a strong Leadership program to succeed

💡 Less than 1% of C-suites reported that they have no leadership development program but...

Managing constant change is a top challenge and one that needs specific skills among leaders and the most reliable way for an organization to ensure that its leaders acquire these skills is to implement a comprehensive leadership development program. A huge majority (89%) of C-suites said that they face barriers to implementing their leadership development programs, according to a new interesting research published by LHH entitled "Bridging the Leadership Development Gap" using data from 1,502 C-Level executives at organizations with 500+ employees across 4 countries.

✅Change is a "major" challenge for C-Suites

Researchers noticed that 89% of C-Suites reported that ‘agility and responding to constant change’ was a challenge, and the same proportion cited ‘adapting to business reorganization/restructuring’ probability due to an increasingly globalized and often turbulent economy.

☝️ Interestingly, the need to adapt to increased remote/ hybrid working was a further change-related challenge that scored highly, at 86%, albeit behind ‘attracting and retaining talent’ (87%).

✅Top Barriers to implementing a Leadership Development program

Researchers noticed that the most common barrier for implementing a leadership development program was ‘lack of interest from those benefiting from the training program’ (35%), closely followed by ‘lack of awareness of the benefits of leadership training’ (33%).

🚨 These two first barriers demonstrate that employers need to better communicate the benefits and importance of leadership development.

☝️ Researchers also believed that organizations sometimes make the completion of leadership development programs a prerequisite for progression or promotion, which can work in some contexts. However, it also risks leadership development being seen as something that only matters in terms of career progression, vastly underselling the benefits to the employee and the organization

✅Important factors for Leadership Development

Researchers found that C-suite executives see the potential of leadership development to address selected factors below:

✔️Reskilling

✔️Recruitment and retention

✔️Developing Empathy and compassion

✔️Monitoring and maintaining employee engagement

✔️Managing remote workers

✔️Innovation and creativity

✔️Business diversification

✔️Business survival

Researchers conclude that C-suites’ belief that leadership development will become more important to business diversification and survival, innovation and creativity, reskilling, and managing remote workers bodes well for their chances of overcoming the change-related challenges identified earlier. Similarly, the recognition of its role in developing empathy and compassion is a cause for optimism in respect to the DEI, employee engagement, and team cohesion challenges.

Employers often fail to take 3 important steps before launching leadership development programs:

1️⃣ Determining the problems they hope to solve through leadership development.

2️⃣ Identifying which skills they need in their leaders to solve these problems, as well as the current and future skills gaps within the organization.

3️⃣Discovering what skills participants want to develop through leadership programs.

🔴 Researchers believed that by failing to address these three questions first, employers are setting themselves up to fail.

👉 The result will be an unfocused leadership development program that does not align with business needs and does not meet participants’ expectations. Any such program will effectively be a one-size-fits-all “leadership 101” course that does not develop the necessary skills and leaves participants dissatisfied and disengaged.

📌Finally, researchers provide 7 Tips for Impactful Leadership Development Strategy:

1. Use a competency framework: Rationalize your methods, connect to your values and your people – and change your mind when it’s time.
2. Smart long-term leadership development strategies go deeper than simple best practice to constantly engage and experiment with new methods.
3. Know where you stand: prioritize your development efforts and focus your spend.
4. Recognize and reward development: Organizations ask their people to focus on results that really matter
5. If you listen, they will learn: Development attracts top talent and drives engagement and retention, but only if it feels like a perk.
6. Inclusion is a starting point, not an end goal: Teams need inclusion and diverse perspectives, and so do organizations.
7. Tech is here to assist you: As generative AI quickly matures, and chatbots and avatar simulations follow, this is the decade when rich LD tech experiences will be democratized.

Thank you 🙏 LHH researchers team for these insightful findings: Kristen Leverone John Morgan and cited persons in this report: Joshua Margolis

Dave Ulrich George Kemish LLM MCMI MIC MIoL

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