Leadership is no longer just for individuals at the top.
Every employee needs to be able to execute the strategy, placing a priority on increasing alignment, accelerating leadership skills, and creating a common leadership language, culture, and practice.
It’s a lot to ask of HR teams, though.
The Challenge for HR: Scaling Leadership Learning
Increasingly, today’s HR professionals are expected to support their organizations’ talent pipelines. From emotionally intelligent and visionary executives, to engaging and effective people managers, to resilient team members who can collaborate and innovate together amid disruption — stronger leaders are needed at every level. Plus, providing equitable access to opportunities for development is no longer optional, but table stakes for employers.
But ensuring that your people leaders have the skills needed for today’s hybrid workplace and providing quality learning opportunities, especially for large populations of managers, is no easy task. Accelerating leadership learning can feel daunting when HR is also often tasked with managing policies around remote work; attracting, retaining, and preparing talent for the future; functioning as a strategic partner to the C-suite; and advocating for a multigenerational workforce with rapidly evolving needs and expectations.
How can the HR or Talent Development function meet the growing demands placed upon it, especially when resources and bandwidth haven’t increased? Even more challenging, how do you provide access to relevant, timely development content for hundreds, or even thousands, of leaders who are spread out across multiple geographic locations?
By offering proven, quality leadership development at scale. Future-proof your organization by scaling leadership development across the enterprise. This is the optimal way to create new capabilities and to communicate to every member of your organization that they are valued and supported.
Admittedly, this requires a significant commitment from your organization. It’s not a singular program or module, but rather a sweeping learning initiative that requires a whole-systems view.
But the results are worth it; leadership development at scale can power increased engagement, retention, and ROI for your organization.
3 Ways to Accelerate Leadership With Leadership Development at Scale
Your internal team may not be resourced to tackle the challenge of accelerating leadership and developing large populations, especially in a short timeframe. Here are 3 steps we recommend to help HR and L&D professionals succeed at offering leadership development at scale:
1. Start by planning your leadership strategy.
Organizations should start with their business strategy and then identify the related strategic leadership drivers (choices about how to be positioned to take advantage of strengths). From there, focus on the leadership implications of the strategy. For example, if your business strategy involves geographic expansion, your leaders will need to have learning agility, resilience, and the ability to lead dispersed and virtual teams.
Too often, leadership development scaling initiatives are rolled out without aligning with the business strategy. Avoid this mistake. As you think about scaling and accelerating leadership development, ask what business opportunities and challenges demand a leadership solution. Consider what organizational priorities you want your development efforts to support, and how you could evaluate the impact of your investment in leadership development.
2. Provide access to relevant content for accelerating leadership development across the enterprise.
Once the strategy is in place, focus on building a learning architecture that will better support leadership development at scale, across your entire population of leaders. It’s important to have clarity about the varying needs and investments that will be required at different levels.
Remember that people learn in different ways, so you should provide a mix of formats and modalities that work for different people at different levels or with different learning styles — from highly personalized development over a longer period of time; to brief, internally led skill-building workshops; to self-directed, self-paced digital delivery. No matter the mode, it’s vital to create a common leadership language around the critical skills needed for successfully achieving your organization’s strategy.
Access Our Webinar!
Watch our webinar, The Challenges of Scaling Leadership Training, and learn how to overcome common issues in delivering leadership development at scale to your employees.
Simply providing access to hours of content that has not been carefully curated or aligned with your employees’ day-to-day reality won’t benefit them or your organization.
By partnering with a solution provider equipped with robust content that has proven impact, your organization can offer high-quality learning experiences that accelerate leadership for large populations or audiences. When choosing a partner, look for one who is future-focused — capable of conducting cutting-edge research and turning it into programs and products that can be easily deployed, enabling you to create a common leadership language around the critical skills for success linked to your strategy.
3. Leverage both internal and external talent.
Consider mixing outsourcing with insourcing for accelerating leadership learning and providing leadership development at scale for your organization.
Few organizations have an L&D team in-house with the skills and capacity required to drive an enterprise-wide initiative. And capacity isn’t just about people. You must also have the right content, technology, and trained facilitators or moderators who can leverage that content and technology to enable learning across the organization.
You may need to seek the support of an external partner, in which case it’s critical to gain alignment between your internal training talent and the external firm or organization providing support. The role of a leadership development partner should be to provide a comprehensive package of trusted, flexible, and actionable content that your team can roll out on the appropriate schedule — freeing up the bandwidth of your internal talent to function as strategic partners to the C-suite, advocate for employees’ evolving expectations, and tailor development to your organization’s unique needs. Partnering with an external provider for assistance with strategy, research, and delivery frees up internal HR teams to keep their focus on providing this type of high-value enterprise support.
Also, think about involving business leaders who can cascade down the key leadership messages to their teams. This helps organizations increase buy-in for initiatives and maximize internal leadership development while offering invaluable insights for team members.
Accelerating Leadership Learning Through Licensing Proven Content
For example, at CCL, we started working with one client organization at the top. After creating customized learning journeys for the senior team, we designed specific solutions for the levels below, emphasizing critical leadership skills for the rest of the organization. We then trained the internal facilitators in the organization, and they led the training in-house, scaling and disseminating key leadership skills across the enterprise, at their own pace.
Similarly, other clients have opted to license our content, often at key times to fulfill specific needs. For example, we partnered with one government agency during the pandemic to provide their burned-out employees with a library of content they could access asynchronously that was focused on providing tools and techniques to become more resilient and bring their best selves to work. We helped the client with a strategy to recruit cohorts of participants to foster an open environment of sharing and rapport-building with colleagues they normally wouldn’t interact with. In just a few weeks, the organization was able to offer leadership development at scale that fostered resilience-building best practices across the organization.
With these examples in mind, your HR team can also effectively accelerate leadership learning and provide leadership development at scale for your organization, thereby preparing your talent — and your business — for the future.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
We can help your organization accelerate learning through providing leadership development at scale. Our corporate leadership development subscription, CCL Passport™, provides curated learning journeys with unlimited access to our world-renowned, comprehensive content library and proven programs and tools for leaders at all levels of your organization.
