Leadership Development – Can you really have a strategy?

In a recent trip to the Middle East with my friends at Harvard Business School Publishing, I had the rare and wonderful opportunity to meet with over 100 leaders in learning, talent and HR, and have a dialogue with them about one of my favorite topics, creating a winning leadership development strategy. Over two weeks, we held sessions in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Qatar, and I was energized by their enthusiasm for the topic and their insightful questions.

My most memorable question from the trip, though, was one I didn’t expect at all. And it came up literally in every session we held.

“Can you really do this? With everything that is going on, and all that we have to keep up with, is it even possible to have a strategy?

Strategy as a Must-Have.

I answered the question with my own question to them. “Imagine the CEO of your firm getting on an earnings call after a tough year financially, and saying to investors, ‘Given the current turbulence in our markets and volatile business conditions, we’ve decided to not only move away from our current strategy, but to abandon the idea of having a strategy for the business at all. Our approach going forward will be just to be attentive to the market and competitors, react to what happens each day and remain as agile as possible.’  What do you think would happen to your share price in the next 24 hours?”

I followed by sharing that the conditions we are experiencing as talent leaders today are the very reason we need to do the work on our leadership development strategy.

But the term “strategy” can feel a little loaded to us in leadership development. Our minds conjur up consultants and market analyses and long-term, rigid revenue projections. Strategy – from a very pragmatic perspective – is simply an approach. How you choose to get from Point A to Point B. More than ever, our business stakeholders need us to know how we are going to get ourselves to Point B.

What is Leadership Development Strategy, Really?

But where is Point B? What really is strategy when it comes to leadership development?

The answer lies in the purpose of talent development overall. Bear with me while I unpack this a bit.

Talent Development, or L&D, has two real jobs. Protect the firm, and grow the firm. The first area, protecting the firm, manifests itself in learning that supports things like legal and regulatory compliance, policy implementation and establishing basic behavioral norms and boundaries for the workforce. Not the sexiest work for L&D, but absolutely critical to the success of the organization.

But if we set that aside, we get to the work we really love. Growing the firm. Everything from orientation training and product release support to new-to-role onboarding and executive development. All part of equipping the organization with the knowledge and skills for growth and success.

Learning on the side of growing the firm has three dimensions, each of which apply directly to leadership development as well. Learning is tasked with:

  • Driving Business Results: Everything we do to equip people to perform their current jobs effectively falls into this category.
  • Increasing Talent Mobility: All the work we do to provide people with skills and mindsets they need to take on more or different responsibilities for the firm belongs here.
  • Enabling a healthy culture: What we do to embed aspirational behavioral norms for individuals and teams that improve the context in which we get work done fits here.

Applying it to leadership development, then, gives us our Point B – our definition of leadership development strategy.

Leadership Development Strategy is a systematic and balanced approach to developing leadership capability and capacity that:

  • Drives improved business results
  • Grows leadership at the pace of the business
  • Enables a healthy organizational culture

Three Key Elements, Working Together

For leadership development, these are not three distinct and separate objectives. Most leadership development experiences have a primary focus in one area, but carry-over effects in others – like new front-line supervisor training that equips them in the job, but also helps them with behaviors that enable a healthy team culture. But the overall strategy, or system of leadership development for the organization, must do all three things effectively, at the same time. The graphic below shows the relationship between the three core objectives and how they work together. 

At the core, learning leaders focus one side of their strategy on driving business results – equipping leaders for the work they need to do today. This encompasses all leaders at all levels, because everyone needs to be effective in their jobs for the firm to be successful, like the previously mentioned new-to-role onboarding for a first-time supervisor. Because it touches all leaders, we refer to this as the breadth strategy. 

At the same time, you have a complementary strategy focusing on talent mobility of leaders – how we prepare leaders at each level to take on an increased scope of responsibility. This is the land of bench programs, HiPo experiences and other investments you make to grow that 1-4% of your leaders at each level that you see as having the headroom to take on more. Because it is a deep investment in a very select group of leaders, we refer to this as the depth strategy.

And surrounding the two is the element of culture. Leaders are culture creators, culture keepers, and unfortunately at times, culture destroyers. Everything leaders do has an outsized impact on culture. From a leadership development perspective, we typically find that good execution of this three-dimensional strategy embeds most development to support culture into the experiences for the first two strategies. Of course, we may choose to add unique elements that focus primarily on culture – DEIB development is a great example here – but we find that organizations who regularly invest heavily in multiple cultural development initiatives for leaders often do not have a robust learning strategy for the other two areas. Organizations that do have a clear strategy use the development mechanisms for the first two dimensions to embed development toward a healthy culture.

Yes, You Can Have a Strategy

So, going back to our original question – yes, there is a Point B, and you can have a strategy to get to it. Now that we’ve covered where we want to go, we can begin to explore in future posts the elements that will carry us to our destination. But for now, we need to remember that our business stakeholders invest in our work because they are counting on us. They don’t need us to give them another program. They need us to have a strategy.