Leadership development helps to create an internal pipeline of new potential leaders or to train & develop existing leaders. In its latest two-part series on leadership, Mercer | Mettl conducted a survey of more than 200 organizations to uncover the best practices that can help organizations achieve leadership success. The second part of the series Leadership Development Trends 2019 focuses on current leadership development practices that organizations follow, the challenges they face, and potential best practices that can help companies overcome these challenges.
Leadership development current trends
- The leadership development process is primarily taken care of by the HR team with assistance from the leadership team in SMEs. In large organizations, leadership development is carried out by the L&D team who are assisted by the leadership team.
- Eight months is the average duration of most leadership development programs.
- 23% of organizations carry out leadership development to enable leaders to drive business growth. 18% of organizations focus on developing interpersonal and behavioral skills in their leaders to enable them to lead people more efficiently.
- 42% of organizations do not have a leadership competency framework based on which they can structure their leadership development programs.
Leadership development challenges
When asked about the most prominent challenge with their leadership development process, 30% of organizations cited the lack of senior management involvement as the key challenge. Other challenges include the long duration of leadership development programmes, high costs and the lack of sustainable leadership competency frameworks.
Leadership development best practices
Based on the results, insights on the best practices on how organizations can ensure that their leadership development programmes meet desired outcomes have emerged.
- Organizations that use competency frameworks enjoy a higher leadership success rate than organizations that do not
- Organizations that have a leadership development program duration of less than 6 months are more likely to achieve their desired objective than those having lengthier programs.
- The leadership success rate is highest in organizations where HRs, trainees (new, existing and upcoming leaders for whom training is being planned) and senior leaders collaborate to plan and execute leadership development.
