Leadership development is going nowhere fast

It has not been hard over the past few weeks to pick out the negative or critical of the HR function, especially when it comes to leadership development. The 2008/9 DDI Global Leadership Forecast1, which surveyed over 13,000 HR professionals and business leaders throughout the world, found that “leadership development is going nowhere fast.” This is compounded by further observations that include decreasing confidence in senior leaders who lack basic skills from 47% in 99 to 35% in 07 for senior leaders and from 42% to 25% for front line leaders.

The survey also finds that organizations are poor at leadership selection, have ineffective talent identification programmes and poor succession planning. A further alarming tendency highlighted in this survey is that HR and managers are locked in a spiraling circle of blame as each blames the other for failures in leadership development. Where development programmes do exist there is a lack of effective measurement of their impact.

This focus on quantifying the HR impact is a common theme these days; however the difficulty in linking or measuring the impact of strategy on performance is highlighted by Kim Warren 2, who hits the nail on the head by stating that this will not be possible until the influence of intangibles on performance is fully understood.