A leadership development plan is a useful tool to ensure that your organization has a strong pipeline of future leaders. The continuous evolution and success of any organization are linked to the continuous growth and evolution of its leadership. Creating a solid leadership development plan helps outline detailed steps to identify and nurture the next generation of leaders within your organization.
A leadership development plan is a strategic plan designed to help employees gain and develop leadership competencies and prepare them for management and leadership roles within an organization.
This plan is usually structured, long-term and personalized for the unique needs of an employee and the organization. It outlines learning objectives and activities an employee is going to undertake to reach their goals.
Leadership development plans are critical to business continuity in times of crises and in competitive markets. Such a plan has the potential to keep your most valuable employees engaged with the organization and dissuade them from seeking alternative job opportunities with competitors. What’s more, the stronger your leaders, the greater your organization’s potential to differentiate itself and remain viable in a constantly changing marketplace.
The pace of change before 2020 was challenging to keep up with, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this change to a speed most couldn’t have fathomed. Most notably, it highlighted the need for leaders to manage more aggressive crises, navigate greater ambiguity, and ensure business continuity through digitization of its operations.
Two of these priorities are connected to creating a leadership development plan for your employees.
According to the HR Leaders Gartner surveyed, they don’t know what skill gaps current employees have. There is little effective integration of learning into employee workflows. What’s more, they can’t create skills development solutions fast enough to meet the evolving skill needs.
The challenges HR Leaders expressed in the Gartner survey are that their leadership bench is not diverse. Their succession management processes do not yield the right leaders at the right time, and as a result, they struggle to develop effective midlevel leaders.
Developing essential leadership competencies and building a diverse leadership pipeline are the key goals for your leadership development plan.
Furthermore, such a plan helps engage your employees and provide them with continuous learning opportunities.
Some organizations have a formal leadership development program and talent pools from which they can select talent for a specific leadership development plan. However, some organizations do not have formal talent identification or assessment procedures.
For those organizations, we would recommend a simple 9 Box Grid. A 9 Box Grid measures potential (future performance capacity) vs. performance (present performance). Ideally, you should select High Potentials, Stars, and High Performers for a leadership development plan.
An agreement among the senior leadership, the manager/supervisor, and the employee about the plan’s objectives, how it will be achieved, by when, and who will participate is essential for a successful leadership development plan.
There may be an overarching leadership style within the organization that is expected of potential leaders. This may be based on the organization’s culture and business needs. According to American Express Business Trends and Insights, there are seven different leadership styles. An eighth style, transformational leadership, has been gaining traction.
| Autocratic | Authoritative |
| Democratic | Pacesetting |
| Coaching | Affiliative |
| Laissez-faire | Transformational |
An organization may prefer one or two of these styles. However, the current uncertainty and volatility of business environments require leaders to function effectively in several of these, depending on the situation.
This degree of agility may not come naturally, but it is an essential skill now that must be acquired. According to American Express Business Trends and Insights, “an agile leadership style may be the ultimate leadership style required for leading today’s talent.”
Identifying key leadership competencies needed for the organization’s current and future success is essential to carrying out a successful leadership development plan. These competencies become the foundation of the developmental plan. Developing them means ensuring the next generation of leaders are ready for current challenges and unknown crises yet to be encountered.
According to Gartner survey findings, “currently, only 21% of HR leaders say peers share accountability or partner with HR to determine future skill needs.” To be ready for another year like 2020, there needs to greater partnership and shared accountability with HR Leaders.
These are 15 key leadership competencies every HR professional should know:
To understand what the leadership development plan will entail, the organization will have to assess the selected employee(s) against the critical leadership competencies identified. The results of this assessment will highlight where the competency gaps of the employee are. Then, use these gaps to identify and/or design the most suitable developmental opportunities for the employee to bridge those gaps.
This is, of course, not an exhaustive list. You should combine the learning strategies in a way that helps your employees meet their goals.
Gartner’s report recommends, “organizations should take a dynamic approach to reskilling and redeploying talent in which all impacted stakeholders work together to sense shifting skill needs and find ways to develop skills at the time of need. With the dynamic approach to reskilling, employees apply 75% of the new skills they learn (far more than with other approaches), and learning begins sooner, as needs are identified faster.”
You want to know if your leadership development program is effective and reaches its goals. That’s why you need to create a way to monitor the employee’s progress during and to determine readiness after completion of a leadership development plan.
One of the ways is a 360-degree leadership assessment from key stakeholders. Continuous feedback and engagement ensure the success of the employee and the plan. Engagement during the process provides an opportunity to tweak the plan’s objectives to mirror organizational changes in real-time. Ultimately, the employee becomes the leader the organization needs.
Using a leadership development plan template allows you to streamline the process of nurturing and advancing potential leaders within your organization. It provides a clear framework that outlines the key components of leadership development, including goal setting, skill development, action plans, timeframes, and feedback.
A customizable leadership development plan template caters to the unique strengths and areas for improvement of each employee, helping engage and motivate them. At the same time, it aligns their growth with the strategic objectives of the organization.
What’s more, incorporating such a template into your organizational practices promotes consistency, accountability, and measurable progress in leadership training.
However, knowing the challenges enables leaders to take preemptive action to avoid potential obstacles to the plan’s successful implementation.
HR and business leaders will be playing catch-up with all the changes that have happened because of COVID-19. However, leaders must press ahead by adapting proven processes, relinquishing those that do not meet the demands of the times, becoming more agile, and acquiring digital and cultural intelligence to face these challenges.
Most importantly, leaders cannot lose sight of employees and the next generations of leaders who want to be equipped to meet the challenges ahead. They may be intimidated by the volatility of the times, but they are also excited about the opportunities that arise during times of crisis.
Invest in your future leaders by creating leadership development plans and ensure the needed skills are identified and developed in real-time.
If you want to become an expert in learning & development and future-proof your HR skill set, check out our Learning & Development Certification Program!
