How to design a strong leadership development strategy
An effective leadership development strategy doesn’t need to be complicated.
However it can’t exist in a vacuum.
What I mean by this is your leadership development strategy has to reflect the best interests of the entire enterprise, not just a strategy for the leadership team.
Organizational culture and leadership
A best practice is to develop your leadership team so they align to your business strategy and reflect it’s organizational culture.
The leadership team can then implement that strategy as a vision that they convey to the rest of the organization.
The way I recommend to do this is by:
- Develop a Vision Statement that reflects your organizational culture, values and business strategy
- Use what I call Vision Transference, where leadership conveys your vision so it assimilates into the organization’s zeitgeist as their mission
- Train the leadership team in the company’s values, vision and culture so they can effectively convey it to the troops
I will briefly cover vision statements and vision transference here. It is covered in more detail in my Leadership Development Program.
The smart way to carry out your leadership development strategy is to develop your leadership team so they can implement it effectively.
How to implement your leadership development strategy
Your leadership team are the primary evangelists of your organization’s leadership development strategies.
The right leadership skills training can prepare them with the skills they need to effectively champion the organizations vision.
Training in the core fundamentals of leadership skills, you can fine tune exactly what skills your leaders need to implement your strategy. For example:
- Communication skills to articulate the vision statement
- Take charge skills so they can rally the organization
- Soft skills to develop presence and gravity
- Skills to influence without formal authority
- Judgement
- etc.
It’s common sense to develop leaders so they have the hands-on leadership skills that they need.
(Find out more tips on leadership training and development here.)
Leadership team development
Skills development provides the building blocks of your leadership team development, for several reasons.
- Most importantly for what I call Leadership Quality Control – using skills development, you can raise the level of the entire team to a skills standards benchmark
- Skills development allows you to fine tune exactly what leadership skills your team needs to develop to carry out your vision
- Leadership soft skills support all other leadership skills and build emotional intelligence
- Leadership skills work well because all levels of leadership can benefit from them.
Unlike personality tests, psychology training, leadership styles or other fungible psychometrics, skills are straightforward. You can develop skills as habits, so they become permanent leadership traits of the entire team.
Lets explore how your vision statement can be the lynchpin of your leadership development strategy.
How a vision statement coalesces your entire
development strategy into a practical plan
President John F Kennedy lays out his vision for America in 1961.
The great unifier called the vision statement is the most underused leadership tool. It has so many uses, it should a top priority of your leadership development plan:
- The right vision statement can coalesce your entire leadership development strategy into a rallying cry.
- A vision statement converts your strategy into a practical implementation that reverberates throughout your organizational culture.
- Using vision transference, leadership can engage and motivate the organization to be on your side
Due to misuse of the terms mission statement and vision statement, lets clarify those now.
Mission statement vs. Vision statement
Vision statement and mission statement are used interchangeably, but there is a key difference.
Vision vs mission corresponds to external vs internal
Vision is an external force, pulling you forward. Mission is an internal force, driving you forward .
Vision statement is the external future goal you architect to drive your audience. Mission is when your audience internalizes that future goal as their own.
An authentic vision that is lucid and graspable by your constituents – such as Elon Musk’s Tesla and Apple’s iPhone – can completely transform an organization and create trillion dollar empires.
For the purposes of a leadership development strategy that inspires your organization, lets simplify what a captivating vision is:
“A captivating vision springs from what is possible
in a graspable future.”
Maximize your influence using Vision Transference
A term I coined called Vision Transference is one of the most powerful leadership communication skills your team can develop.
It is a mechanism that integrates your vision as your organization’s mission.
It works using vision affirmation:
- You combine your vision statement with an affirmation statement to communicate through leadership to the organization
- By affirming your vision to your audience as an affirmation, over time they likely to accept it as their own mission.
This is why one of your first leadership development strategies should be to articulate and affirm a branded organizational vision statement.
Do this with a short, clear, crisp, memorable vision statement that reflects the values and culture you want. Then using affirmations, you affirm the vision to all your audiences.
By expressing and repeating a properly articulated vision as a consistent statement, it becomes part of your organization’s culture.
Vision Transference is a powerful tool to command authority, by providing your audience with a mission that motivates them.
My Leadership Development Program explores vision and affirmations in depth.
About the Author and Course Creator
Larry LaFata is a talent development specialist and the founder of modernleadershipcenter.com and defineyourcareer.com.
He has a unique ability to synthesize research and innovation into organized, usable concepts. This provides clients with streamlined leadership skills training and employee development solutions they can implement quickly.
After 30 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies, Larry turned to his passion: leadership development and talent development. The core of his course creation approach is customized self-assessment and skills development templates. No psychometric tests or psychology assessments are ever used.
Larry has authored: Define Your Career, Leadership Development Program, Employee Development Plan with skill templates and How to use Rewards to Motivate Your Team.
Larry’s mission is to better humanity through innovative talent development strategies. His continuing efforts in talent development keeps him in the forefront of thought leadership in the industry.
How leadership roles determine leadership development strategy
To clarify your leadership development framework, lets gain some perspective on which skills are required for each leadership role. This will powerfully guide your leadership development strategy.
Basically, the higher your leadership role, the more abstract and intangible skill set you may need to develop.
This Venn demonstrates the leadership training and development continuum.
It shows a big picture estimation of skills development requirements for functional, management and executive leadership roles.
- Employees require job skills training and functional skill development
- Managers may require functional, management and executive leadership skills
- Executive leadership requires management and executive leaderships skills such as vision, emotional intelligence, branding and other abstract skills training
While there are skills development overlaps, its pretty clear a production employee doesn’t yet need to develop vision and branding skills. However soft skills will help them support their hard skills and functional duties.
This should help you to understand which role needs to develop which skills.
I provide some examples from my talent development courses below.
Employee development plan examples: functional job skills development
Here’s an example of functional skills development from my Employee Development Plan.
This individual development plan example is a skills development template for a Sales Representative.
I start with job skill proficiencies self-evaluation as part of their performance review.
All the job skill proficiencies directly relate to their roles.
Leadership development plan template: executive leadership skills development
You’ll notice in this Leadership Development Program example template, we focus on advanced soft skills development
Management and executive leadership development require intangible interpersonal soft skills.
This could include basic leadership training skills such as being diplomatic and polite. It also includes vision, branding, developing presence and center of gravity.
The beauty of skills development is you can pick and choose the skills you want your leaders to develop, so they can:
- Reflect your organizational culture, brand and values
- Build out the values of the vision you want to implement
- Reflect your vision , vision and culture
- Build the new culture and values you want to integrate into your leadership team development
Summary of how to develop a strong leadership development strategy
Design your leadership development strategy around the culture, values and brand of your entire enterprise, not just your leadership team.
Be sure to develop a vision statement as a tool to convey your strategy to your entire organization on the same page.
You can use leadership skill development and soft skills to fine tune the leadership team’s development.
These leadership training topics, soft skills development and other effective leadership strategies are all included in my step-by-step Leadership Training Program.
You can find out more here:
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