Effective Leadership Development Strategies to Improve Team Performance

Managers, the pillars of our organizations, are cracking. Forty-five percent of managers need to spend more time managing projects than managing people. Fifty-four percent of managers are suffering from work-induced stress and fatigue, and only one in two employees is confident in their manager’s ability to lead their teams to be successful in the next two years. 

Amid these challenges, 62% of HR leaders say their leadership strategies don’t reflect the capabilities leaders need to succeed in today’s business environment.

To deliver dynamic, impactful leadership development, pressure-test your current and future leadership development activities against these five agile learning principles:

• Learning to earning. Ensure leadership development is aligned with the organization’s business, talent and leadership strategies by partnering with business stakeholders to identify success metrics. Ask:

  • What must learning and development (L&D) do to help the business achieve its strategic objectives? 

  • What actions, behaviors or initiatives will enable each objective? 

  • What metrics will be most helpful to track, and what trade-offs will ensure we focus on only the most important metrics?

  • What data can we define, disaggregate and capture consistently in each area?
    

• Motivation multipliers. Create leader profiles or personas to shape an effortless, highly relevant leadership development experience. Identify frameworks and workflows leaders are familiar with and integrate them into the experience.
  

• Dynamic pathways. Reimagine the design and delivery of leadership development programs to provide consistent experiences while also addressing leaders’ unique needs. For example: 

  • Design modular content that can be rolled out incrementally and repurposed in other programs as needed.

  • Blend synchronous and asynchronous learning formats to reduce the demand for live training and make learning easier for geographically distributed leaders while still providing peer learning opportunities. 

  • Empower participants to personalize their learning path so they can access the learning topics they need when they need them.

• Flow of value delivery. Design and deliver development with an understanding of how and when leaders will apply it in their roles (see Tab 2). Work with business stakeholders to identify high-impact experiential learning opportunities focused on the following areas: 

  • Access to best practices for approaching a problem

  • Expanding leaders’ scope of responsibility (i.e., “stepping up”)

  • Building resilience through change and adversity

  • Developing interpersonal skills to navigate challenging relationships

  • “Knowing before showing” — i.e., actively preparing to communicate ideas successfully

  • Making high-stakes decisions through deliberate reflection
    

• Social amplification. Engage peers through social connections and learning communities to support and sustain leader learning virally.

Today’s work environment requires leadership development that equips leaders to navigate not just a leader-to-employee relationship, but a human-to-human one. This calls for leaders to be more authentic, empathetic and adaptive. HR leaders are trying to build commitment, courage and confidence in leaders to help them answer the call, but human leaders remain few and far between. Eighty-four percent of HR leaders say employees’ expectations for more human treatment at work have become a permanent part of the landscape — but only 29% of employees say their leaders are effective at human leadership.

The challenge: Typical leadership development approaches don’t address the very human emotions — doubt, fear and uncertainty — that are holding leaders back. For example: 

• Only one in three business leaders trusts data and analysis from HR — making it hard to drive commitment using data.

• Fear is a natural human reaction that can’t be “trained away.”

• Prescriptive guidance might help leaders interact confidently — but that guidance won’t apply to every scenario.

To break the barriers and help leaders deliver on the need for human leadership, take a human approach that first recognizes leaders’ humanity and then directly addresses the emotional barriers. Specifically, ensure that your leadership development helps to:

• Drive commitment by leveraging trusted sources — employees and fellow leaders — to make the case for change.

• Build courage by preparing leaders to lead despite their fears

• Create confidence by supporting leaders to use their judgment by limiting the scope of questions and ambiguity they face

Adopting a more human approach to leadership development increases the number of human leaders to nearly one in two and improves employee outcomes in the following ways: 

• 12 percentage point increase in employees’ intent to stay

• 37 percentage point increase in employee engagement

• 30 percentage point increase in employee well-being