“Talent wins games,
but teamwork wins championships”
A CFO focused on trimming costs asks the CEO, “We’re spending a lot on leadership development. I think it’s frivolous and risky – what if our directors leave for another company after everything we’ve invested in them?”
The CEO replies, “What if we don’t invest in our leaders and they stay?”
It seems like many companies are overly focused on talent retention, but talent is not the whole story.
Sometimes talent is the wrong focus
Here are a few examples:
1. Talent is just that, not motivation, dedication, or capacity to learn. Pushing for talent could leave you with people at the top of their game with no room to grow and no motivation to contribute.
2. Even with great talent development, you can lose key people when their spouse gets a great job in a different city. Failing to build depth on your bench could cause fragile teams.
3. You can have a group of highly talented people who don’t know how to team effectively and cancel each other out, just look at NBA all star teams that underperform expectations. Focus on the team as a system instead of the individuals to get long term success.
Develop leadership capacity with intentional systems
It’s not really human nature to think about systems and long term growth. Instead, many prefer to chase quarterly profit and bask in the glow of ‘talent.’ If you prefer to build strong foundations and thriving long term systems that build your leadership capacity, read on for ideas to make that happen!
Ten keys to implementing effective leadership development systems
1. Identify critical thresholds with their required knowledge, skills, and abilities
Most people understand that moving from technician to leader can be a challenging transition. Do you know all of your organization’s thresholds though? We step over thresholds as we enter a new room, but figuratively they mark important transitions in a career. We think some key thresholds in a company include onboarding, technician to leader, leader to strategic leader, strategic leader to executive. Before you start to plan training events for employees, identifying key thresholds will allow you to target trainings for the new skills people need as they step into new roles.
2. Integrate training opportunities to minimize redundancy and maximize reinforcement
We often see clients who have cobbled together talent development programs. This leads to uncoordinated solutions made of off-the-shelf training at one level and workshops led by an HR connection at another. Each portion typically covers redundant material, yes another EQ lesson, and fails to complement the others. Instead, each training opportunity should build on past material and tee up the next training for success. Employee user experience matters! Cobbled solutions frustrate employees with redundant information at best and actively undermine learning or foster cynicism at worst. Each development opportunity should have just enough overlap to reinforce, never with so much to feel redundant.
3. Provide a clear career trajectory for learning and advancement
Leaders often bemoan Gen Z employees quitting to find more opportunity, but we have found in many interviews that Gen Z is not asking for a handout, just clear access to learning and opportunity. A well designed talent development program offers a clear trajectory for employees to learn and promote with obvious milestones and frequent check-ins. I still remember Plebe Summer at the Naval Academy where the upper class would taunt us with ’10 counted pushups’… 1-2-3-4-4-4-4-4 … and so on. Do that to your employees, and they will absolutely leave!
4. Proactively facilitate connections.
New empirical research points to what we already know: companies need in person corporate offsites to foster connections. In the past, connections seemed to just happen. We had a water cooler and people talked. Now, many teams are remote and although that has its advantages, connection is more challenging. This makes employees feel isolated and prevents innovative ideas from percolating into revenue streams. A good talent development program intentionally connects people from different silos to spur creativity and enable strategic leadership as people advance. Find more tips to foster connection here.
5. Ensure curriculum is aligned with YOUR core values and culture
Many off-the-shelf leadership training kits are available from popular companies, but jamming an online toolkit into your talent development pipeline is jarring and sends the message that you don’t care. Instead make sure that each part of your plan is clearly linked to your mission, vision, and values. If your values include collaboration, highlighting curriculum on communication and creativity would be far more helpful than a day long seminar on emotional intelligence. Talent development should always be a culture amplifier, not a check in the box.
6. Link every lesson back to work
In academia we call it transfer of training, you might refer to it as stickiness. A key aspect of transferring training is using on-the-job training (OJT). That’s why we take leaders outside to practice a leadership skill and then have them commit to trying it at work. We follow up with a coaching session to see how the work application went. If your talent development program does not offer immediate application opportunities at work, it is a waste of your money. When we periodically assess the efficacy of programs we design, this is one of the key aspects we check for. You should be asking your trainers and contractors to show how people use their lessons at work too.
7. Integrate training into your daily rhythm and people systems
A mistake we often see is companies shelling out big bucks for leadership development programs without integrating them into their operations and people systems. For example, a pricey feedback seminar for your managers does not do much good if the approach your facilitator teaches does not sync with the performance management system you currently use. If people learn to give positive feedback weekly, but are only expected to give a performance appraisal once a year, they will be frustrated. If you invest in a team coach for executive leaders, but your meeting structure kills collaboration, your executives will leave for companies that allow them to implement what they learned.
8. Build in quality coaching opportunities to reinforce learning
We are 100% confident that people who join a team development program outside with us will have breakthrough moments and radical new insights. However, we also know those become fleeting moments of clarity when clients get back to their email inboxes. Cairn Leadership Strategies provides ongoing coaching both to help hold clients accountable to what they said they would do on an outdoor offsite, and to help them integrate insights into the actual work. A mistake here is blindly matching coaches to leaders. We have heard so many stories about employees saddled with a coach who they did not resonate with and feeling stuck in useless conversations. Better to let people choose a coach who has experience actually leading people. You can even set up coaching sessions outside to leverage that clarity again!
9. Build in continuous measurements of success.
Return on investment and program efficacy are questions that bedevil leadership development. To create a truly effective talent development program, you will want to build in checkpoints and metrics to see if they are working. A big mistake here is the famous “how much did you like this” training question. Most people are not going to give a low score on that question, but facilitators still insist on using it. Maybe because it feels good to get 9’s and 10’s?
Better questions include, how many participants were promoted within a year of this training? Did people get better at the skills the company needs like decision making, delegation, and big picture thinking? Have the people who work for the participants promoted more quickly and done higher quality work? Has retention gone up? We like to customize these questions with clients and use quantitative and qualitative analysis to answer them every six months. Then we can get regular feedback and adapt the program to what participants need.
10. Leverage the outdoors as a catalyst.
Potential clients tend to be surprised that we won’t work with them unless they commit to some amount of leadership training outside. We are not saying all training should be outside (that would also be silly), but avoiding time outside is a huge missed opportunity. We use shared adventures as catalysts. Science increasingly shows that time outside makes us healthier, more connected, more creative, and even cognitively sharper. Why would you forgo those benefits for yet another booze soaked conference room bound weekend? We take teams and leaders outside for our clients so that they can solve tough problems, build cohesion, and craft memories that drive culture for decades. If you are interested in learning more about a team offsite or a talent development program overhaul, we would love to have a quick conversation!
Transform 'talent development' into a leadership capacity building system.
To recap, building leadership capacity should be the backbone of your company culture. It should be integrated through every important threshold your employees face and it should focus on the skills and knowledge they need to effectively accomplish the organizational mission. ‘Talent development’ is quickly moving from a competitive advantage to a survival imperative as AI and other forces take over positions that might not have required so much leadership capacity. Following the above principles will help you craft the workforce you need with a strong long term foundation to can count on.
If it gets too complicated or you just don’t have time to focus on it, we offer fractional talent development program services. We will set up a program to fit your culture and goals and run it for you at a fraction of the cost until you onboard a full time talent development professional. Learn more about fractional talent development programs here.
