Is your leadership program effective?

Implementing a Leadership Development Program that gives Measurable Results

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Is your leadership program effective?

Implementing a Leadership Development Program that gives Measurable Results

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HR Directors are often faced with the challenge of making sure their organization’s leadership development program is effective. Of course, the definition of ‘effective’ is key. It can’t just be based on the post-training participant feedback. It has to be more than that.

Most learning and development professionals are familiar with Kirkpatrick’s 4 levels of Evaluation, and I myself have always been primarily concerned with being able to measure at ‘Level 4: Results’ – which I like to think of as: “How did business and/or the organization improve as a result of all that expensive training that you did?” Which is, understandably, difficult to do.

Lots of choices – sometimes too many

Not only that, but leadership development programs can vary across an organization: Finance has its own ideas based on a certain leadership philosophy; the Sales organization has a different idea; Manufacturing uses one particular psychometric profiling tool, the Company University recommends a different one, the local training manager prefers another one (and just loves running the egg-drop team-activity everywhere); Leaders are measured with a 360 tool that doesn’t really link to what is taught in any of the leadership programs – and nobody is measuring the impact on actual business results anyway.

In short, the training budget gets spent, and it’s not necessarily wasted, but that doesn’t imply that you can be sure it’s effectively-spent.

One-stop-shop Solution

Thankfully not all companies are like this! But some undoubtedly are, and in any case HR Directors and their learning teams need to have a leadership development system that works, and can give measurable results. I know I did, and I spent many years being frustrated with the lack of such a “one-stop-shop.” There were always a lot of very good programs and promises, but at times I felt I was just delivering a shopping list of products rather than a comprehensive “leadership system” where I could positively demonstrate the difference made.

Integrated Leadership

So, let me introduce you to Integrated Leadership, which combines Assessment tools, Surveys, Seminars and Coaching into one complete leadership development solution, with the goal of creating a “Highly-Engaged and High-Performing Organization that Achieves Extraordinary Results.”

The fundamental idea is that the practical leadership concepts are:

  • Taught in workshops
  • Assessed through the 360 feedback tool
  • Reinforced through one-on-one coaching
  • Measured at an organizational level through the Employee Engagement Survey.
  • And, by linking individual performance appraisal results to the Integrated Leadership Matrix, the HR team can evaluate a) how their leaders are growing as leaders and b) whether there is an individual performance improvement as a result – which itself is a good way of measuring the impact on business results (i.e., use individual performance appraisals as a proxy for that. Not perfect, I agree, but a good indicator.)

You can see a more detailed presentation about the program here.

For next time

In the next article I’ll give an overview of how the Integrated Leadership program is being implemented in some companies.

Building a Leadership Program that Gives Measurable People & Business Results

Leadership and Engagement

Leadership Training and Development Seminars

See you next time!

Kevin

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