Fixing the Leaking Leadership Pipeline

Cornerstone has penned a new whitepaper on the issues surrounding leadership development and building a sustainable pipeline of leaders in your organization. We urge you to download a copy. I think you’ll find that our new paper is an even-handed exploration of the issues confronting organizations and their plans for developing future leaders.

"Leadership development" itself might be a bit of an outdated term - not that it’s not relevant in the modern organization, because it surely is. Instead, we mean to say that the term "leadership development" comes with some baggage. As typically defined over decades of use in human resources departments, the idea too often is meant to only concern a narrow strata of senior leadership roles.

Don’t get us wrong. Any effective leader is an employee worth developing and hanging on to. It’s just that contemporary technologies and processes, alongside new (often flatter) organizational hierarchies and ready access to talent management data, mean that we no longer have to consider "leadership development" in the narrowest sense of the concept. It’s no longer reserved exclusively for that hand-picked batch of high-performance / high-potential / high-fill-in-the-blank folks who need to be coddled and cared for like incubating eggs.

As companies look down the chain to develop and build future leaders from within, HR professionals need to consider that leadership and training curricula must be designed for each different level, from executives to employees. On other words, it’s no employee left behind. In our new whitepaper we examine the challenges at each level (not just your senior leaders).

Present-day thinking about cultivating leaders hasn’t only changed in terms of how we define who a potential leader is. The very skills, competencies and characteristics of leadership are evolving as our business and cultural environment keeps shifting.

Although traditional competencies such as integrity, vision, judgment and people development will likely always be relevant, organizations needing to develop leaders today must be ready to look beyond the conventional. They must create an environment that allows high performers to grow professionally and, ultimately, develop new skills that will lead businesses into the future.

Our new whitepaper describes just this shifting sense of what real leadership skills are and asks interesting questions. What were the core attributes of a leader in the 20th century and how have those qualities transformed over the last decade alongside rapid change in the world of business?

Of course, it’s not enough to ponder these changes in leadership development without making some suggestions for what the new world order looks like in practice. In other words, how does your organization tackle the challenge of building a durable pipeline of successful leaders?

Developing and building leaders at all levels of an organization is hard work. However, the rewards are worth it: lower employee turnover, higher workforce empowerment, increased work productivity and successful execution of business goals. Check out our new whitepaper to find out more.