Building Leadership Bench Strength

In today’s increasingly complex and tumultuous economic environment, organizations are ever more aware of the need for leaders whose capabilities, attitudes and behaviors align with and support the organization’s specific business objectives.  Unfortunately, many companies are also coming to the difficult realization that their leadership bench (the current and future leaders within the organization) may lack many of the capabilities that will be critical to sustained organizational success.  In fact, according to a survey of senior-level executive development professionals in Global 500 corporations, leading companies lack the quality and depth of executive talent needed to grow and compete in the future.  They also recognize that increasing leadership bench strength and ensuring replacements for key jobs will be a top priority for leadership development programs and processes in the years to come.

A recent survey of over 8,000 business leaders, conducted by the Corporate Executive Board uncovered some important findings concerning the current state and future of leadership development.  The Board analyzed the characteristics of effective leadership, the strength of the leadership bench in these critical areas and the relative effectiveness of development strategies at improving leadership bench strength.  The analysis revealed some important findings for those responsible for leadership development:

Leaders consider people-management skills as the most important attributes of effective leadership, followed by strategic-management skills and personal characteristics.  When asked what People Skills were most important the leaders noted the following:

• Clearly communicate expectations
• Recognize and reward achievement
• Inspire others
• Put the right people in the right roles at the right time
• Persuade and encourage others to move in a desired direction
• Hold people accountable
• Commitment to staff development

Strategic Management skills include:

• Adapt to changing circumstances
• Identify and articulate a long-term vision
• Develop a deep understanding of markets, customers and competitors
• Correctly assess risk and return

And when asked what Personal Characteristics were most important the leaders surveyed reported:

• Honesty and integrity
• Passion to succeed
• Accept responsibility for successes and failures
• Open to new ideas
• Challenge the status quo

It was also interesting to note that even though identifying and articulating a long-term vision is considered very important to effective leadership, the leaders surveyed felt it is the single greatest weakness of the leadership bench.

The leaders were then asked to rank order the relative importance of various processes and methods for developing their leadership skills.  In their view the top ten ways to develop are:

1. A large degree of decision-making authority
2. Create a leadership development plan
3. Interaction with peers
4. Executive coaching
5. A Mentor
6. Feedback
7. Turn around a struggling business
8. People-management skill courses
9. Work in a new functional area
10. Work in foreign countries

Finally, the 8,000 leaders surveyed felt that their organization’s leadership development programs ranged from being “not very effective” to only “somewhat effective”.  With that challenge in mind and with the goal of increasing leadership bench strength, leading organizations are focusing on five critical strategies to improve their leadership development efforts:

Redefine Required Leadership Profiles - Recognizing the importance of people-management and strategy-planning skills, organizations are seeking a more balanced profile of attributes among their leaders.  They focus on identifying the key skills and attributes the organization needs to be successful.

Target Future Leadership Needs - organizations are working to attract, identify and develop leaders earlier in their careers and “deeper” in the organization.  They see the importance of including the “up and coming” leaders in development programs as well as the “usual suspects”.

Ensure Manager Accountability for Leadership Development - those within the organization who have the greatest impact on development success – a leader’s boss – are often neither fully enabled nor required to ensure success of development efforts.  Leading organizations are moving to assign clear accountability for leadership development to line managers by linking compensation and incentives to performance against leadership development goals.

Create a Continuous Learning Culture - organizations see the need to create a culture that allows leaders immediate access to development resources and integrates development with the skills required in the leader’s daily work.  Development programs are seen not as episodic, discreet events but long-term efforts.  Classroom learning is augmented with e-learning, coaching and peer-to-peer interaction, follow-up support and reinforcement activities. 

Customize Development Opportunities to Leaders’ Needs - organizations must work to align development activities with a leader’s individual needs and ensure customized development plans match the right development programs to the right leader at the right time.  When combined with feedback and coaching to maximize program impact, such customized development interventions have the potential to show extremely high return on investment.

Moving from current practices – which centers development on discrete programs – to the strategies outlined above – wherein leadership development exists as a business discipline integrated throughout the organization – will result in immediate and tangible improvements in leadership bench strength.  And a strong bench equates directly to stronger business performance.  The study found that companies with strong benches enjoy above-average 36-month revenue growth relative to their industry peer group.

Source: Corporate Leadership Council Leadership Survey