Focus, commitment, and capability are the three crucial ingredients for attaining RESULTS. You can have a great vision (focus) and all the commitment in the world, but if you don't have the skills for the job, you are not going anywhere. Likewise, focus and skill are meaningless without the commitment, motivation, or the drive to get things done. And finally, you can have tons of commitment and great skills, but if you are not going in the right direction, you are going to burn a lot of valuable resources (being busy but not productive)--commitment & capability must be focused. Focus, commitment and capability should all be geared to the execution of strategy. Conclusion: develop precisely those skills that will most help the organisation achieve its vision.

Strategic action learning projects (leadership development program built around real organisational challenges and opportunities) can be used to enhance the success of strategic projects and turn your strategic initiatives into opportunities for leadership and organisational development.


Designing a Leadership Development Program
Generic Program Design Template

1. Define corporate strategic imperatives--the highest priority strategic business objectives over the next 5-10 years.
   
   
2. Identify the objectives of your LD program. Prompts:
   
   
   • Why do you want to develop leadership talent in your organisation?
     
   • What would happen if you didn't develop leadership talent in your organisation?
     
     
3. Identify the leadership competencies you will require 5-10 years from now:
   
   
   • What kind of (1) technical skills, (2) cultural attributes, and (3) leadership competencies do we need to achieve corporate strategy?
     
   • What individual, team, and organisational capabilities do we need to achieve our vision & strategy?
     
   • What competencies and capabilities do we need to take us beyond our current strategy?
     
   • Who are your best leaders (all levels) and what makes them so successful?
     
   • When is your organisation at its best?
     
   • What will your leaders of the future look like? What will they know and be able to do…?
     
     
4. In the light of your LD objectives (your answers to questions 1-3, above), choose the most appropriate leadership development methods and approaches. Resources:
   
   
   • Databases of leadership development models, methods, and approaches
     
   • Interviews withyourorganisation's executives and star performers
     
   • Analysis of what works best in yourorganisation
     
     
5. Choose your LD providers and learning opportunities.
   
   
6. Choose your participants very carefully-criteria must be fair and strategically relevant, i.e., appropriate to your LD strategy, which itself must be rooted in corporate strategy.
   
   
7. Align management systems and practices (your firm's "organisational levers") with your leadership development program. Resources: iLEAD workshops and consultation in "Managing Vision, Purpose, and Culture." See also our essay "Building High Performance Organisations."
   
   
8. Discuss how success will be ensured and how to make the stakeholders capable of and willing to commit the time and resources necessary. This should be done early in the program, and reviewed regularly. Resources:
   
   
   • iLEAD' databases of critical success factors; databases of metrics for measuring the success of your program; use your organisational levers to support and reinforce desired results; etc. See resources on "Metrics" (below).

   
   Evaluation & assessment are necessary at every stage of your program design and implementation. Pilot projects are recommended. To ensure successful implementation & completion of the project as a whole, borrow savvy tactics from relevant organisational change models, see e.g., Hamel, "Waking Up IBM: How a Gang of Unlikely Rebels Transformed Big Blue," Harvard Business Review (July-August 2000): 137-146. Schaffer & Thomson, "Successful Change Programs Begin with Results," Harvard Business Review (Jan.-Feb., 1992): 80-89. Kotter, "Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail," Harvard Business Review (March-April 1995): 11-20.
   

Resources
Strategic Workplace Learning and Leadership Development

• Boshyk, Yury, ed. Business Driven Action Learning (St. Martin's Press 2000).
  
• Conger, Jay. "Can We Really Train Leadership?" Strategy & Business, Issue 2 (Winter 1996).
  
• Conger, Jay A., and Beth Benjamin, Building Leaders: How Successful Companies Develop the Next Generation (Jossey-Bass 1999).
  
• Giber, David, Louis Carter, & Marshall Goldsmith. Linkage, Inc.'s Best Practices in Leadership Development Handbook (Linkage Press 1999).
  
• McCall, Morgan W., Jr., Michael M. Lombardo, & Ann M. Morrison. The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job (Lexington 1988).
  
• Tichy, Noel M. with Eli Cohen. The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level (Harper Business 1997).
  
• Ulrich, Dave. Results Based Leadership (Harvard Business School Press 1999).
  
• ___ . "Intellectual Capital = Competence x Commitment," Sloan Management Review (Winter 1998): 15-26.
  
• Ulrich, Dave, and Hope Greenfield, "The Transformation of Training & Development to Development & Learning," American Journal of Management Development, 1 / 2 (1995): 11-22.
  
• Ulrich, Dave, Mary Ann von Glinow, and Todd Jick, "High Impact Learning: Building & Diffusing Learning Capability," Organisational Dynamics, 22 / 2 (1993): 52-66.
  
  Cf. also:
  
  
• Apps, Jerold W. Leadership for the Emerging Age (Jossey-Bass1994).
  
• Argyris, Chris, "Teaching Smart People How to Learn," Harvard Business Review (May-June 1991).
  
• Farkas, Charles M., and Suzy Wetlaufer, "The Ways Chief Executive Officer's Lead," Harvard Business Review (May-June 1996).
  
• Georges, James C., "The Myth of Soft Skills Training," Training (January 1996): 48-54.
  
• Hanson, Morten T., Nitin Nohria, and Thomas Tierney, "What's Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?" Harvard Business Review (March-April 1999): 106-116.
  
• Heskett, James L., and Leonard A. Schlesinger, "Leading the High-Capability Organisation: Challenges for the 21st Century," Tomorrow's HR Management, eds. Ulrich, Losey, and Lake (Wiley 1997): 25-38.
  
• Lombardo, Michael M. and Robert W. Eichinger, "Human Resources' Role in Building Competitive Edge Leaders," Tomorrow's HR Management, eds. Ulrich, Losey, and Lake (Wiley 1997): 57-66.
  
• McCall Jr., Morgan W. High Flyers: Developing the Next Generation of Leaders (Harvard Business School Press 1998).
  
• Mintzberg, Henry, Bruce Ahlstrand, & Joseph Lampel. Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management (Free Press 1998), chapter 7.
  
• Wetlaufer, Suzy, "Driving Change: An Interview with Ford Motor Company's Jacques Nasser," Harvard Business Review (March-April 1999): 76-88.
  
• Wiggenhorn, William, "Motorola U: When Training Becomes an Education," Harvard Business Review (July-August 1990).

Action Learning
Most exciting & important trend in strategic workplace learning

• Boshyk, Yury, ed. Business Driven Action Learning (St. Martin's Press 2000).
  
• Conger, Jay A., and Beth Benjamin, Building Leaders: How Successful Companies Develop the Next Generation (Jossey-Bass 1999), chapter 8.
  
• Dotlich, David L. and James L. Noel. Action Learning: How the World's Top Companies Are Re-creating Their Leaders and Themselves (Jossey-Bass 1998).
  
• Marquardt, Michael J. Action Learning in Action (Davies-Black 1999).
  
• Vicere, Albert A., & Robert M. Fulmer. Leadership by Design: How Benchmark Companies Sustain Success through Investment in Continuous Learning (Harvard Business School Press 1998).
  
  Cf. also:
  
  
• Heifetz, Ronald A. Leadership without Easy Answers (Belknap Press, Harvard 1994).
  
• Pedler, Mike (ed.). Action Learning in Practice, Third Edition (Gower 1997).
  
• Weinstein, Krystyna. Action Learning: A Journey in Discovery and Development (Harper Collins 1995).
  

Metric
Measuring the value of training & development

• Phillips, Jack J. Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement Programs (Gulf 1997).
  
• ___, Ed. Measuring Return on Investment, Volume 1 (American Society for Training & Development 1994).
  
• ___, Ed. Measuring Return on Investment, Volume 2 (American Society for Training & Development 1997).
  
• Stamps, David, "Measuring Minds," Training (May 2000): 76-84.
  
• Vicere, Albert A., & Robert M. Fulmer. Leadership by Design: (Harvard Business School Press 1998), chapter 8.
  

Related iLEAD Programs

Workshops: see our Leadership Development Workshops

Consultation:

• Creating Your Leadership Development Strategy
  
• Turning Strategic Initiatives into Leadership Development Opportunities
  
• Workshop Design / Improvement
  
• Training Needs Assessment