In recent meetings with talent leaders about how they are approaching leadership development – and talent development in general – there have been widely varying viewpoints on what is meant by “strategy.” In many cases, the starting point of a discussion is something like measuring impact, choosing technology, or buy vs. build on content. Sometimes the word strategy is tacked on the end (e.g., “I need to create a measurement strategy”) to reflect that it’s an approach that cuts across multiple learning solutions.

Stuck in the Tactics

But measuring impact or buying technology are really tactics that should support a larger strategy. And before you say I’m just playing with semantics here, there is a very pragmatic reason why the difference is so vital to your approach. I see it on the faces of talent leaders as they wrestle with these decisions. If the decision is not connected to a larger, governing purpose and system to developing leadership talent, then the decisions are arbitrary, or worse, they are based on even more tactical considerations, like how much work it might be to implement. As Lewis Carroll once said, If you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will get you there.

Because of this, the tactical question inevitably must lead to a higher-level question. Continuing with the measurement example, the next question is – what are you trying to measure, and why? (OK, so that’s two questions.) If the answer is to prove the value of a program, or demonstrate that some change took place, then your measurement approach might not be connected to a larger purpose – it doesn’t help you see if you are getting closer to accomplishing your overall objectives for leader development, which is how you demonstrate that your strategy is working.  

Elevating the Discussion to Strategy

An answer to that question that is rooted in strategy might sound more like this – “we need to accelerate the advancement of high-potential leaders at the director level so we can improve our internal fill rates by 10% in the next 18 months,” or “we are seeing performance issues in our call centers that’s hurting our customer NPS scores and we want to see if a better supervisor onboarding experience can be part of the solution.” These answers are not strategic just because they are clearer; it’s because they show a direct connection to the larger purposes of leadership development in supporting the firm – improving the leadership pipeline to support future growth, and improving business performance in the here and now.

 Since strategy comes in layers, perhaps a clearer way to talk about it is to break it down into three distinct dimensions:

• Strategic Objectives: These answer the question, “What are we trying to do with leadership development?” Typically, these focus on areas aligned directly with the business – improved business performance, increased talent mobility of leaders, and enabling a healthy culture.
• Development Framework: The area most often skipped, the development framework represents leadership development as a system, instead of a collection of programs doing different things (one talent leader referred to her portfolio of solutions as a “junk drawer of programs”). The framework is built around the audience types and sizes, talent and business needs related to those audiences, and the key development intervention points (e.g., onboarding to a new level of leadership) vs. ongoing development.
• Implementation Approach: This is where our operational tactics and tools live – content approach, digital learning ecosystem, vendors, staffing model, measurement approach, etc. They are all aligned optimized to support the development framework.

Focus on the Framework

So instead of jumping right into all the pressing tactical and operational decisions that need to be made, first look to your framework – the system you manage and the results it achieves in terms of business productivity, talent pipeline and culture enablement. The system answers the questions about how a leader will develop over time and at different levels. It lays out when you apply a structured learning intervention for leaders as they advance in their careers, based on the need to learn.

If the idea of a defined framework or learning system is not well understood in your organization, in future posts we will begin to outline the components of an effective leader development framework. But by focusing on the framework, the decisions you need to make on tactics to enable it become much clearer. And, as is often the case, it may generate useful discussion with the business about what leadership development really can do for the organization.