New Challenges Require New Solutions
HR, Talent, and L&D teams are expected to provide meaningful, accessible development to their organizations, but that can be challenging in today’s ever-shifting landscape. Mergers and acquisitions lead to new, flatter org charts and expectations of doing more with less. Global supply chain issues, political instability, rising energy costs, a tight labor market, return-to-office mandates, and hybrid work environments all mean that organizations need flexible, agile leaders.
These changes all call for increased collaboration, connection, and coordination, and there’s never been a greater need for effective leadership at scale.
The optimal way to achieve these critical outcomes and widespread alignment across the enterprise is by scaling leadership development opportunities across the entire organization.
But how do you support developing leadership at scale, when your workforce is huge, staff levels are constantly shifting, resources are limited, and people are struggling to keep up with day-to-day challenges? HR and L&D professionals need tools for scaling leadership, along with strategic recommendations to help them deliver evidence-based training content and transformational development experiences across the enterprise.
Leadership Development at Scale: 3 Keys
As our white paper outlines, when organizations are looking to scale leadership development as widely but effectively as possible, it’s essential to focus on these 3 principles.
1. Plan your leadership strategy.
Devise a leadership approach at the outset. Organizations don’t go to market without a sales or operations strategy. Likewise, there should be hesitance about going to market without a leadership strategy.
Think through how different levels of your organization are affected by culture shifts that require new goals and strategies, and view leadership as a lever to execute the business strategy and drive organizational performance. Organizations that are most effective at creating new leadership capabilities focus on linking talent development to business results.
2. Provide access to relevant content.
Align the training content you offer to support the overall leadership development process. Simply providing access to hours of content, especially if that content isn’t closely aligned with your organizational priorities, won’t be very beneficial to your employees. Scaling leadership development requires a significant commitment across the organization. It’s not a program, but rather a sweeping initiative that requires a whole-systems view.
Large-scale change requires that you create the right architecture to support your learning and development objectives for leaders at every level. To maximize success, focus on the skills, behaviors, and practices needed by individual leaders and on the organizational leadership capabilities needed to support the business strategy.
3. Leverage internal and external talent.
Consider whether, and how, your internal team could use the support of an external partner. Scaling leadership development effectively requires readiness, in terms of capacity and capability, and many in-house HR and L&D teams aren’t equipped to develop hundreds or even thousands of leaders at once. You may not have access to the tools or infrastructure required to provide meaningful leadership development that’s scalable (to provide access to all talent) and customizable (to align development with your KPIs).
At the same time, HR and talent leaders have an increasingly important role in partnering with their C-suites on organizational strategy and advocating for employee needs. Partnering with an external provider allows internal teams to focus on providing high-value enterprise support.
When internal capability doesn’t align with delivery need, or when your in-house team needs to place its focus elsewhere, combine insourcing with outsourcing strategically. Integrate your business leaders and internal facilitators to champion the initiatives, increase alignment, and generate buy-in, and lean on trusted external providers for proven training content and solutions.
Scaling Leadership Development Enables Collective Potential
Imagine the impact that will result in your organization if there is shared leadership vision, language, and behaviors — all linked directly to critical business needs.
Scaling leadership development is the optimal way to create new capabilities across the enterprise, and to communicate to every member of your organization that they are valued and supported.
Flexible development options can help you broaden access to learning for every member of your organization, across leader levels, and through every stage of their career journeys. And with the right partner and solution, you can meet the increased demand for training and development, regardless of the bandwidth of your L&D or HR team.
The 3 steps for scaling leadership development that are outlined in this paper will help you to more quickly achieve concrete business results, improve retention and engagement, and drive an organizational culture of learning and growth.
Download White Paper
Download this paper to learn more about the 3 principles for effectively scaling leadership development across the enterprise, and get our specific, strategic recommendations for HR and L&D teams.
