Share this article
Change, Leadership and Partners is proud to present a 10 step approach to help organisations create powerful customised Leadership Development Curriculums that are comprehensive, interconnected, and serve their strategy.
Some organisations have been driving a compelling leadership development landscape for years. Many restart and redesign leadership development curriculums because their old programmes are not serving their current strategy well.
According to Korn Ferry Institute in their recent Real World Leadership Survey:
“More than half of executives rank their leadership development ROI as ‘fair’ to ‘very poor’ and they would throw out and rework half of their current leadership development approach if they could. If able to start over with leadership development, business and HR leaders would only keep 52% of their current approach.”
Leadership Development Curriculums can be described as interconnected development programmes that aim to develop leaders to sustain business success.
10 step how to create powerful customised leadership development curriculums
1. Mission The Big Why
The Mission is the essence of the leadership development curriculum. This should be expressed by the executive board or curriculum sponsor. For example, should the curriculum help to change the organisational culture, drive a new strategy or develop leaders to drive strategic change?
2. Success factors for learning
Each organisation has its “learning DNA”. Knowing what to maintain, change or develop based on past experiences, and putting new techniques into practice is a key success factor in learning and development.
3. Emphasis Importance of competences
Leadership competences are often defined in line with strategy. Different target groups, however, demand the emphasis of different competences. For example, the ability to drive change is higher for top-level leaders than for first-level leaders. CLP is using an Objective/Emphasis Matrix to define objectives and topic-emphasis for certain target groups.
4. Objectives What to achieve ?
Difficult to phrase and often overseen, objectives for all competencies and target groups clarify what should be achieved in any programme. For example, to increase confidence in a particular competency, or to develop an effective feedback framework within a target group.
5. Interconnections How to tie it all together
Some traditional curriculums separate hierarchies from each other. More challenging and richer are those who let leaders from one target group intersect other target groups, horizontally, vertically and diagonally as facilitators, mentors, sounding boards or manager coaches.
6. Overall programme logic A one glance story
An explanatory comparison of the flow and the story of development programmes. This is a powerful high-level communication approach for participants and other stakeholders to understand where their specific programme fits into the leadership development landscape of the organisation.
7. Learning architectures The fundament of learning
Learning architectures are the blueprint of every programme. They show a complete and congruent picture of modules, interventions, virtual elements, on-the-job activities and other forms of learning.
8. Interventions Modules and interlinks
Interventions are the brick and mortar of learning architectures. They link together smoothly to create comprehensive and interconnected programmes that meet mission, values, competences and objectives.
9. Evaluation Getting a feel for the outcomes
While investing in programmes and people, organisations should answer two questions:
- What outcomes do the programmes generate for the participants and for driving the organisation strategy?
- How do elements of the programmes contribute to these outcomes?
10. Roles Responsibilities and allocations
Lastly, roles should be defined to answer the question of who serves the programmes best as trainer, expert, mentor, speaker or coach?
Yours,
Dr. Marcus Gottschalk and CLP Team