“We want to be ready for the future, but don’t know how to prepare for what we can’t predict.”

As outlined in our new Talent Development Challenge Report, this is one of the quotes we hear most often from our clients. If your organization is like most, you’re keeping an eye on the headlines and thinking about the future, but preparing for the unknown feels impossible. You know bigger challenges are coming, and leaders and teams need to work together differently, but future-ready skills are difficult to identify — and harder still to develop.

Senior executives tell us they feel their leadership pipelines aren’t equipped to accomplish today’s priorities — much less tomorrow’s. The shortfall between current capabilities and forecasted leadership needs is called the leadership gap, and in today’s climate of instability and multiple interconnected crises, addressing it is more critical than ever. Steering the business through uncertainty requires not just leadership skills, but also building greater leadership capacity — more sophisticated ways of thinking, increased perspective-taking, and leadership wisdom.

While you can’t prepare everyone for every scenario, you can help your leaders learn to think in bigger new ways. You need a protective scaffolding of development to elevate leaders across the board and secure your organization’s future. Join us to learn how building competencies and capacity in a pipeline of adaptable leaders at every level is more straightforward than you might think — and more important now than ever.

What You’ll Learn

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to identify gaps in your organization’s leadership pipeline
• Why vertical development is important for building leadership capacity
• How a strong pipeline of leaders leads to organizational success

The post Building Leadership Capacity: Overcoming Talent Development Challenges appeared first on CCL.

Talent development is more critical than ever in today’s landscape of economic and geopolitical instability, generational shifts, industry disruptions, and hybrid workplaces.

But creating greater collective capability in this unpredictable context isn’t easy.

Forecasting which skills your workforce will need most in the future can feel difficult, and planning talent development is especially challenging in times of increased uncertainty.

But one thing is clear: Organizations that invest in talent now will be much better positioned to succeed when things stabilize and outlooks improve.

Research consistently shows the benefits of leader development, which enables individuals to become more agile, resilient, effective, and future-oriented. At scale, talent development ensures that the entire organization itself becomes more agile, resilient, effective and future-oriented, too. Layering development across all levels and functions creates a protective scaffolding for the organization.

The Top Challenges of Talent Development

Our report reveals the 6 biggest talent development challenges that we hear most often from clients and offers reflection questions and actionable recommendations to address each:

1. Pipeline: Addressing talent gaps to strengthen the leadership pipeline
2. Focus: Prioritizing the development of what’s most important
3. Overload: Breaking through despite competing demands and distractions
4. Adaptability: Navigating uncertainty and orienting to the future
5. Conversations: Strengthening and deepening foundational communication
6. Scale: Expanding development efforts across the entire organization

This guide will help you recognize your talent development challenges and build confidence and clarity in your approach to overcoming them — starting with understanding where your organization is now, and where it needs to go.

Start From Where You Are

Beyond time and budget constraints, readiness also plays a critical role in the success of any development efforts, especially at scale. Understanding your individual, organizational, and L&D readiness levels is crucial for planning and supporting effective talent development.

Whether your next step is assessing your organization’s current state and building a foundation for development, expanding your existing efforts, or elevating talent development to take it to the next level, at scale — we can help, and meet you where you are.

Download Report

The post Talent Development Challenges for HR and L&D Leaders appeared first on CCL.

Our white paper explores what research suggests are the direct benefits of leadership development (i.e., program-specific outcomes) and the indirect benefits of development, including increased employee engagement and attractiveness to potential employees. It outlines 4 key leadership development benefits that have emerged from both our own and other research, noting that investments in leadership development:

1. Facilitate organizational alignment,
2. Enhance the organization’s change readiness,
3. Promote equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), and
4. Strengthen leadership pipelines.

Creating Competitive Leadership Advantage

When implemented effectively and comprehensively, leadership development has the potential to grow individuals and transform an entire organization from being one that merely meets its objectives into one that excels.

That’s why we say that one of the key benefits of leadership development is also simply that it creates competitive leadership advantage. And having a competitive leadership advantage not only raises the organization’s level of leadership capacity, developing a healthy leadership pipeline for the future, but also enables organizational agility, which is essential in today’s era of constant disruption.

One of the most critical drivers of organizational success in adapting to change is effective leadership at all levels — not just at the top.

To create the engagement and productivity required for this level of performance, leaders need to inspire others, drive innovation, collaborate across boundaries, and create an environment of psychological safety and inclusion. But these leadership skills don’t simply emerge and spread throughout the organization on their own. It takes focused effort and intentional strategy to optimize the leadership talent organizations need today and in the future.

Building these needed skills, from the top to the bottom of your organization, can feel like an impossible task. How can you possibly get quality development into the hands of all employees to fully leverage the benefits of leadership development?

The answer is by implementing a leadership development initiative that can be scaled. A scalable leadership development program is one that can easily be adapted and executed across an organization, regardless of its size or structure. A scalable development program unlocks leadership development’s benefits and creates significant competitive leadership advantage.

Download our white paper today to learn the many benefits of leadership development and how to scale it to start building a stronger talent pipeline at your organization.

Download White Paper

The post Creating Competitive Leadership Advantage: 4 Ways That Scaling Development Powers Engagement, Retention & ROI appeared first on CCL.

HR, Talent, and L&D teams are expected to provide meaningful, accessible development to their organizations, but that can be challenging in today’s ever-shifting landscape. Mergers and acquisitions lead to new, flatter org charts and expectations of doing more with less. Global supply chain issues, political instability, rising energy costs, a tight labor market, return-to-office mandates, and hybrid work environments all mean that organizations need flexible, agile leaders.

These changes all call for increased collaboration, connection, and coordination, and there’s never been a greater need for effective leadership at scale.

The optimal way to achieve these critical outcomes and widespread alignment across the enterprise is by scaling leadership development opportunities across the entire organization.

But how do you support developing leadership at scale, when your workforce is huge, staff levels are constantly shifting, resources are limited, and people are struggling to keep up with day-to-day challenges? HR and L&D professionals need tools for scaling leadership, along with strategic recommendations to help them deliver evidence-based training content and transformational development experiences across the enterprise.

Leadership Development at Scale: 3 Keys

As our white paper outlines, when organizations are looking to scale leadership development as widely but effectively as possible, it’s essential to focus on these 3 principles.

1. Plan your leadership strategy.

Devise a leadership approach at the outset. Organizations don’t go to market without a sales or operations strategy. Likewise, there should be hesitance about going to market without a leadership strategy.

Think through how different levels of your organization are affected by culture shifts that require new goals and strategies, and view leadership as a lever to execute the business strategy and drive organizational performance. Organizations that are most effective at creating new leadership capabilities focus on linking talent development to business results.

2. Provide access to relevant content.

Align the training content you offer to support the overall leadership development process. Simply providing access to hours of content, especially if that content isn’t closely aligned with your organizational priorities, won’t be very beneficial to your employees. Scaling leadership development requires a significant commitment across the organization. It’s not a program, but rather a sweeping initiative that requires a whole-systems view.

Large-scale change requires that you create the right architecture to support your learning and development objectives for leaders at every level. To maximize success, focus on the skills, behaviors, and practices needed by individual leaders and on the organizational leadership capabilities needed to support the business strategy.

3. Leverage internal and external talent.

Consider whether, and how, your internal team could use the support of an external partner. Scaling leadership development effectively requires readiness, in terms of capacity and capability, and many in-house HR and L&D teams aren’t equipped to develop hundreds or even thousands of leaders at once. You may not have access to the tools or infrastructure required to provide meaningful leadership development that’s scalable (to provide access to all talent) and customizable (to align development with your KPIs).

At the same time, HR and talent leaders have an increasingly important role in partnering with their C-suites on organizational strategy and advocating for employee needs. Partnering with an external provider allows internal teams to focus on providing high-value enterprise support.

When internal capability doesn’t align with delivery need, or when your in-house team needs to place its focus elsewhere, combine insourcing with outsourcing strategically. Integrate your business leaders and internal facilitators to champion the initiatives, increase alignment, and generate buy-in, and lean on trusted external providers for proven training content and solutions.

Scaling Leadership Development Enables Collective Potential

Imagine the impact that will result in your organization if there is shared leadership vision, language, and behaviors — all linked directly to critical business needs.

Scaling leadership development is the optimal way to create new capabilities across the enterprise, and to communicate to every member of your organization that they are valued and supported.

Flexible development options can help you broaden access to learning for every member of your organization, across leader levels, and through every stage of their career journeys. And with the right partner and solution, you can meet the increased demand for training and development, regardless of the bandwidth of your L&D or HR team.

The 3 steps for scaling leadership development that are outlined in this paper will help you to more quickly achieve concrete business results, improve retention and engagement, and drive an organizational culture of learning and growth.

Download White Paper

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