How Healthy is Your Leadership Pipeline?

At some regular interval, your organization refreshes its strategic plan.  Perhaps you did that in Q4 as you set this year’s budget.  Now that you are well into the new year, have you thought about one of the key factors that will help you meet the plan: your organization’s leadership pipeline?  Do you have that nagging question in the back of your mind that you may not have the leadership needed to achieve the near- or long-term plan?  Do you have a structure and process in place to develop the leaders you’ll need?  Current leadership development processes and programs in your organization may be doing a good job of developing today’s leaders, but what about tomorrow’s?

Even though strategic plans are no longer set in stone, organizations should review that 3-to 5-year horizon and evaluate whether they have the leaders with the skill sets that will be needed in the future.  Can your current leadership across the organization take it to the next level of performance, with an understanding of the future requirements related to organizational culture, evolving workforce, technology evolution, compliance issues, and the performance changes dictated by stiffer and stiffer global competition?  Maybe not?

The leadership competencies and skills required three, five, ten years from now may be very different from those of today.  Building your leadership pipeline goes beyond a succession plan.  It is a well-planned-out company-specific structure for developing leaders by moving them across and up the organization so that they are well groomed to understand the entire business and suit the organization’s future needs.  It also includes training or development plans that build understanding of future, projected global trends and best practices related to technologies, organizational culture, structure, processes, leadership and organizational performance.

Start by asking the right questions: What functional areas will future leaders need to understand in order to lead the organization?  Are your current and future leaders being developed related to the best-practice areas listed above?  Do you have the pipeline structured and budgeted?  Many organizations have refined leader training, education, and hiring practices, but not through the lens of the different competencies and skills required in the future of a high-performance organization.

Why is leadership pipeline important?  What happens if you don’t have one?  These questions can be answered from many organizations’ negative past experiences.

1. Without a leadership pipeline, the organization will struggle to achieve its potential.
2. A failure to correctly identify and develop your most talented leaders causes them to leave the organization prematurely, and you may be losing the very leaders you need to keep — especially in this low-unemployment environment.  (A future blog will highlight the mistakes most organizations make in identifying their “fast-track” high potential employees.)  Losing talented employees causes a brain drain that is very damaging to the organization.
3. Without a leadership pipeline, the organization seeks leaders from outside the organization – leaders who may be missing vital institutional knowledge.

This is the perfect time to go beyond the strategic plan to take the necessary steps for evaluating and improving your leadership pipeline.

If you’d like a discussion about assessing or improving your leadership pipeline, we can help.  Contact us at [email protected] or call 207-739-9540.

Connect with Verna Lynch in LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/transformingorganizations/.