By 2025, millennials will comprise 75% of the workforce.
Developing Employees Into Leaders
Interactive Guide + Workbook
The most successful companies don’t recruit leaders. They grow their own.
A leadership shortage is one of the biggest barriers to growth at companies around the world. In fact, developing new leaders is the No. 1 talent challenge facing organizations worldwide, with 86 percent of companies rating it as “urgent” or “important.”
Skilled leaders are in short supply, with 85 percent of executives not confident in their leadership pipelines.
These challenges are particularly important as older leaders retire at accelerating rates and millennials assume leadership roles. According to Forbes, millennials will comprise 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. Millennials are no longer the leaders of tomorrow — they are rapidly becoming the leaders of today. The data shows that many organizations are not preparing millennials for management positions. And yet, if millennials aren’t promoted, there’s a good chance they’ll go elsewhere.
Investing in your talent matters.
We’re experiencing a training gap, not a skills gap. Companies agree that developing leaders is critical, and yet research shows they are doing little about it. Specifcally, 61 percent of companies offer no leadership training. No wonder there is a leadership shortage.
To sustainably grow, organizations are shifting from viewing leadership development as a “nice to have” to a “need to have”. Leadership development programs are mission critical to organizational success.
Join us in developing the next generation of leaders. Use this guide to transform the way your leaders are sourced, developed, and retained.
The performance of your leaders has a massive impact on your bottom line.
Most executives instinctively know that strong leadership is essential for overall organizational success. However, in most organizations there is a lack of urgency to improve leadership skills driven by a belief that an organization’s current leadership capacity — and subsequent performance — is good enough. But is it?
Regardless of company size, developing great leaders deserves investment. That investment serves as a competitive advantage, as it ensures your managers are getting the most out of your workforce.
How much are low performing employees costing your company?
Quality talent sticks around.
It’s not easy to retain top talent. Research shows that 56 percent of organizations struggle to keep top performing employees.1 Replacing them is even more challenging, costing $20,000 on average to replace a departed millennial employee.2
Creating an organization that develops quality talent from within is the secret sauce for retaining engaged employees and staying competitive.
The key to retaining your people is providing them with the professional development they need to advance their career. This bene ts you as well, as it lls your leadership pipeline with a large pool of strong internal candidates.
78 percent of employees say they’d remain longer with an employer if they saw stronger career paths.3
Millennials matter.
They’re rapidly becoming the leaders of today, but many are not prepared.
Millennials want to develop as professionals, and while that feels like a no-brainer, it actually di erentiates them from prior generations. Career progression is their top desire from a workplace.1 But many do not feel they’re prepared or receiving the necessary leadership training to e ectively lead.
Use leadership training to develop quality, con dent millennial leaders, as well as to retain them. Help steer their careers at your organization. Millennials want to work with purpose, and they want to feel that their workplace is investing in them. It’s critical for organizations to recognize the correlation between leadership development opportunities and high retention rates.2
of millennial leaders feel unprepared for their leadership role.
of companies say they don’t do an excellent job developing leaders at all levels.
What are the key drivers making leadership training an organizational priority?
Developing leaders from within doesn’t happen overnight. It can take months or years to build a pool of quality talent. To help jumpstart the process, we’ve put together
a workbook of questions designed to get you thinking about what an e ective leadership program looks like.
There’s a variety of reasons why leadership training is agged as a priority. Dig deep to identify what the key drivers are for your organization. These are a few examples that we often come across.
An aging workforce
A current cohort of leaders approach retirement, and new candidates need to be ready to ll the gap
First-time managers
A workforce has C-level executives and VPs, lower level employees, and lots of rst-time managers to upskill for leadership roles
High attrition rates
An organization su ers high turnover and needs to retain its current workforce
Leadership skills gap
An organization has identi ed a lack of leadership skills in managers and needs to course-correct
What are the organization goals?
It’s the role of senior leaders and key stakeholders to determine the specific leadership skills needed to successfully execute the company’s strategy. Without a clear vision, it’s difficult to inspire new leadership.
Identify organization goals that you’re trying to accomplish through an e ective leadership program.
Examples:
Upskill individual contributors moving into management roles
Create new products, enter new markets
Ramp up sales operations
Create a atter corporate structure
Define what success looks like. It’s different for each organization. For example, a high-growth tech company may define success as the ability to quickly up-skill first time managers. Conversely, a government agency may de ne success as the ability to teach an aging workforce new technologies and incorporate them into their leadership style.
How can you get executive team buy-in?
Success is more likely when senior leadership sees value. Help executives understand short and long-term pain points that occur when building leaders from within is not made a priority.
What are your leadership skills gaps?
One way to discover leadership skills gaps is by surveying your employees. This gives employees, both managers and individual contributors, an opportunity to share their voice. It allows you to measure how employees feel and think about their job, leadership, and the company’s culture — as well as identify what’s working well and the things that can be done better.