In today’s ever-changing and competitive market, leadership development has become a top priority for companies. Developing emerging leaders is crucial to ensuring the highest quality people are in key roles and for succession planning. However, lack of resources and time can often deter companies from starting the process.
If you’re looking for ways to get started with developing your emerging leaders, here’s a quick start guide to help you:
1. Identify Your Emerging Leaders and Develop a Program
Before creating a formal program, it’s important to identify emerging leaders based on their characteristics. This will enable you to focus on developing their skills early on. Programs should be tailored to their leader level, as the challenges will differ depending on each audience’s next-place and in-place roles.
2. Engage Emerging Leaders to Solve Business Problems
Action learning is an effective way to engage emerging leaders in solving real-life organizational challenges. It helps them quickly develop and apply new skills while benefiting the organization at the same time. Assigning an emerging leader to lead or participate in a project that focuses on improving employee engagement, streamlining processes, or designing a technical training program for new hires can help them develop skills such as systems thinking, problem-solving, financial acumen, and change management.
3. Create Opportunities for Experimental, On-the-Job Learning
Emerging leaders thrive on challenges. Provide them with assignments that fall within their capabilities, such as leading a global, cross-cultural work group, managing a large-scale organizational change initiative, or overseeing a high-pressure assignment with visibility to senior leaders. This will give them opportunities to experiment and grow, attracting and fostering top talent within your organization.
4. Use Group Coaching to Facilitate Learning from One Another
Group coaching provides a shared experience and the opportunity for leaders to work together and support each other in achieving their goals. Participants take a more active role in leading group discussions while the coach provides support and assistance as needed. Intact teams can participate in group coaching to improve the way they work together, or newly promoted leaders can learn and benefit from other new leaders’ experiences.
5. Encourage Informal Mentoring to Broaden Exposure and Work on Just-in-Time Challenges
Mentoring involves experienced leaders sharing their knowledge with new or emerging leaders. Mentoring programs should be tailored to address the specific needs of the business and emerging leaders. For instance, a mentoring program could match first-time leaders with high-performing leaders at their same level or pair an emerging leader with a near-retirement team member for knowledge transfer.
Developing emerging leaders is an investment that will pay handsome dividends in the long run. It will help you develop the next generation of leaders for your organization and attract and retain top employees, which can improve productivity at all levels of the organization. By following this quick start guide, you can start developing emerging leader qualities within your organization today.