Leadership Development: Seven Steps to Success

Good Leaders Equal Good Business To identify, attract, fill, and retain corporate leadership talent, companies need to focus on hiring strategies, employee development, and career and succession planning. By employing consistent, organizationwide talent management programs, companies can develop effective leadership and return significant business value.

To identify, attract, fill, and retain corporate leadership talent, companies need to focus on hiring strategies, employee development, and career and succession planning. However, most companies are not well prepared to fill vacancies in their leadership roles. By employing consistent, organizationwide talent management programs at all levels, companies can develop effective leadership and return significant business value.
Elements of Leadership Development Programs

Talent management functions supported by a unified talent management technology platform are key components of a comprehensive leadership development program. A successful leadership development program begins with alignment to company strategy and an understanding of the leadership styles needed to execute that strategy. By following the seven steps outlined here, organizations can establish the formal leadership development programs that will produce current and future company leaders.
1. Determine Leadership Style

To determine the leadership style best suited to a particular organization, executives must take into consideration the type of work, the complexity of the organization, and the qualifications of the followers. In many cases, a variety of leadership styles will be required to lead company groups ranging from manufacturing operations to marketing, finance, creative services, and more.
2. Identify Your Leaders

To evaluate potential leaders, leadership programs must focus on expected leadership skills and competencies. Competency models can be used to identify leadership potential during performance review and career counseling sessions. Based on key leadership competencies, capabilities are tested and evaluated during the performance review process. Managers can assess goals and development plans, solicit 360-degree feedback, and rate individual progress.

Leadership Development: Seven Steps to Success

Building Tomorrows Leaders Leadership development requires the effective execution of integrated talent management practices. Todays applications provide the enabling platform.

3. Identify Leadership Gaps

To identify leadership gaps, organizations need to assess individual as well as organizational readiness. To do so, consider following these steps: Determine current and future leadership requirements. Compare those requirements to the current leadership team. Identify current leaders who may be at risk as well as succession plans for those at risk or planning to leave. Then look at the leadership development pipeline to identify skills gaps and the time required to fill them.
4. Develop Succession Plans

Create back-fill strategies using data captured in the recruiting and performance review processes coupled with individual career plans. Add multiple candidates to a succession short list and view all the best options. Display multiple talent profiles side by side to quickly identify the best fit. Track candidate readiness based on skills, competencies, and performance. Then promote top candidates based on relative ranking and composite feedback scores.
5. Develop Career Plans

Career planning has historically been considered an individual responsibility. However, research shows that companies that support career planning for their employees earn business benefits in retention, engagement, and leadership protection. If companies do not provide employees with career planning and advancement opportunities, their competitors will. Self-service career planning will help motivate and retain talent by empowering them to generate and view a career plan.
6. Develop Skills Roadmaps

Once you have identified high-potential employees, develop a skills roadmap for these future leaders. People learn and develop new skills both inside and outside the classroom. To support informal learning, you should consider activities such as coaching, rotational assignments, job shadowing, mentor relationships, and project leadership. At the core, the very definition of learning should reflect todays nontraditional learning approaches and incorporate social networking tools into the process.
7. Develop Retention Programs

Linking pay to performance can be a strong employee motivator; however, goal alignment helps potential leaders stay focused on whats important to the company. Recognize excellent performance with retention programs, and base the upside of bonus potential on the success of both the employee and the company. Leadership development requires the effective execution of integrated talent management practices. Todays applications provide the enabling platform. By taking advantage of them, companies can deliver a unified approach to recruitment, assessments, performance management, succession planning, career planning, and individual development programs.

CONTACT US
For more information on Oracle Taleo Enterprise Cloud Service, visit oracle.com/taleo-enterprise. For more information on Oracle Taleo Business Edition Cloud Service, visit oracle.com/taleo-tbe.

Author: Matthew Rice Copyright 2012 Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. 0612