The 9 Essentials of an Organizational Leadership Development Strategy
1. Provide Top-Down Leadership
In any transformation, engaging all levels of leadership is vital, and can be the difference between success and “just another training.” Within any organization, people follow their leaders. If the organizational focus is on a customer focused culture transformation, then the senior most leader and the executive team must be fully involved. It is critical that every level of leadership is equipped to demonstrate that they fully embrace and support the transformation.
Executive Alignment Session(s) are aimed at ensuring executives:
- Understand their role in leading and visibly supporting the strategy
- Set the expectation of engagement and responsibility in all activities and outcomes
- Establish Executive roles & responsibilities as it relates to driving specific behavior change
- Create opportunities to shape the organizational conversations and the outcome
2. Create a Leadership Competency Framework
The goal is not to create a competency framework. The goal is to get the benefit of a competency framework. The benefit is clarity and a common understanding of the desired leadership behaviors and the well-guided process to bring them to life.
Build:
- Consult an inclusive and diverse group of stakeholders and data
- Assess the present and future environment to align on expectations on what is critical to lead within your organization
- Determine structure based on use cases and build YOUR Leadership Framework
Equip:
- Create a common understanding of leadership behaviors, applied and coached
- Cascade the value of the Leadership Framework
- Empower people to use it for personal development and feedback
- Enable leaders to be effective in development and performance
Adopt:
- Make it manageable: adoption-friendly tools and a repeatable process
- Respond to successes and challenges to adoption through pulse checks
- Begin to measure the behaviors, individual and organizational, when making important decisions about leaders and leadership
3. Establish Content Priorities
Once the creation of the Leadership Competency Framework is complete, leadership development modules can be selected, tailored and built as an integrated web. Eagle’s Flight Living Leadership™ is an integrated solution that uses a tiered approach to leadership development across an entire organization, from emerging leaders to senior leaders.
4. Model, Coach and Require Desired Behaviors
Every successful performer can look back to a coach who gave them the vision, direction, and even the push to achieve extraordinary results. In order to achieve these results, leaders need to model an example others can follow, coach for results, and require changes in behaviors to guarantee success.
More specifically, leaders at each level must:
- Recognize and explain the importance of MODELING desired behaviors
- Apply one-on-one COACHING techniques that maximize the performance of their direct reports
- REQUIRE and hold others accountable to deliver the desired outcomes
- Distinguish coaching from performance management
5. Address Natural Decay
Maximize the return on investment from the leadership development strategy via implementation of retention and reinforcement strategies designed to eliminate learning decay and ensure adoption of new behaviors.
6. Measure Progress
The goal of measuring performance impact is to ensure that the desired behaviors at the leadership and organizational levels are changing to reflect the management framework, throughout the organization.
Recommended Measures:
- Recognize and explain the importance of MODELING desired behaviors
- Apply one-on-one COACHING techniques that maximize the performance of their direct reports
- REQUIRE and hold others accountable to deliver the desired outcomes
- Distinguish coaching from performance management
Eagle’s Flight Support Options:
- Act as a consultant to your Performance/HR Team
- Take full responsibility for the creation and execution of the assessments and surveys
7. Build an Integrated Web
Spiders build their web by first creating anchor strands which act like the foundation. Then, to create strength and stability, they connect those anchor strands using connecting threads.
In a similar way, to bring your Leadership Model to life, the learning curriculum program will focus on the core anchor strands based on the Eagle's Flight learning content that bests supports your culture and objectives.
Within this framework, key leadership behaviors will be addressed, and driven by your internal team, Eagle’s Flight, and other necessary organizational support structures, such as succession planning, career pathing, etc.
8. Align HR Practices
To review HR Practices within the context of the larger business goals and the current leadership initiative and provide practical recommendations to better maximize the return on people.
Components:
- Audit of HR practices and procedures
- Recommendations
Audit of HR Practices
An HR audit is a comprehensive review of all aspects of the HR process to identify meaningful potential process improvements and areas where implementing best practices could drive a meaningful impact on the results of the business.
9. Identify Pitfalls
During the planning stages of every project, we have an entire Eagle’s Flight team dedicated to work with you to identify all possible risks to successful project execution. Risk management planning is collaborative within the project team. Using the Risk Log Template, an alternative solution, decision-maker and action plan is created for every identified risk (logistics, language and culture, in-class availability, etc.) to guarantee success of execution.
