Aligning Your Organizational Leadership Development Strategy

Senior leaders frequently complain about the shortage of leaders and lack of leadership development in their organization.  When I hear this my first thought is, “What’s your strategy?”  And on those occasions when I do ask the question, there’s rarely a concrete systematic answer.

If there’s no intentional strategy for the development of leaders then your people won’t know what steps to take and therefore will fall short in their leadership development efforts.  And that’s the senior leadership’s fault not the follower’s fault.   You don’t have to have an answer tomorrow or even next month, but begin the process of deciding on a strategy that works for your organization.  One of the bad habits organizations develop is allowing each department to do leadership development their own way.  Suddenly you end up with a hodgepodge of methods strung across the organization with no alignment or best practices that make the organization stronger in this discipline.  So, get your team together, talk about what’s working, what’s not working and then make every effort to align your organizational strategy for developing leaders.  You’ll be doing yourself and your leaders a huge favor.