The Benefits of Leadership Development, Especially at Scale
Our white paper explores what research suggests are the direct benefits of leadership development (i.e., program-specific outcomes) as well as the indirect benefits — increased job satisfaction and engagement, greater employee retention, stronger appeal to prospective candidates, and clearer ROI.
The evidence is substantial. Based on data from over 13,000 CCL program participants, the area leaders felt most capable of improving after training was team engagement and developing others. After 2 months, those same leaders estimated a 60% average improvement in engagement and employee development. Across more than 5,400 leaders, 81% reported feeling more capable of facing workplace challenges and 86% saw significant improvements in their overall leadership effectiveness.
The paper outlines 4 compelling reasons to scale leadership development enterprise-wide:
- Facilitate organizational alignment,
- Enhance the organization’s change readiness,
- Make growth accessible to everyone, and
- Strengthen leadership pipelines.
Creating Competitive Advantage Through Leadership
When implemented effectively and comprehensively, leadership development has the potential to grow individuals and transform entire organizations.
That’s why we say that one of the key benefits of leadership development, especially at scale, 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 perpetual crisis and 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. Organizations that cultivate exceptional leaders only at the top risk losing their most promising employees to rivals.
But these leadership skills don’t simply emerge and spread throughout an organization on their own. Strong leadership spreads through intentional investment in a leadership ecosystem that develops leaders consistently across teams, functions, and career stages.
Building these needed skills, from the top to the bottom of your organization, can feel like an impossible task, among the top talent development challenges. How can you possibly get quality development into the hands of all employees to begin to improve employee engagement and retention, thereby fully leveraging the benefits of leadership development across the organization?
The answer is a systems approach to scaling. And scaling isn’t simply running more programs for more people. It’s embedding development into the flow of everyday work — connecting it to what leaders are already doing, so it shows up in how managers coach and in the shared language that surfaces in real conversations and decisions, rather than something employees step away from work to experience once or twice a year.
Download our white paper today to learn the many benefits of leadership development, see how organizations like SPX Technologies and BioCryst Pharmaceuticals have scaled it, and unlock lasting competitive leadership advantage for your organization.
Download White Paper
Download this paper to learn more about what research has identified are the direct and indirect benefits of leadership development, including the connection between leadership development, employee engagement, and retention.
