Improve your Leadership Pipeline - 5 Useful Techniques

9th July 2021

Long-term leadership and long-term sustainability in any successful business are interdependent. If your organization is already thriving and successful, then you can assume that your current leadership strategy is effective. However, many organizations do not understand why it is necessary to prepare future leaders. Hence, they are reluctant to invest in human resources.

Developing a sturdy leadership pipeline will not only help your organization to achieve immediate success but also ensure the same for a longer period of time. To develop a strong and good leadership strategy, you can try to apply these five techniques.

1. Coaching and Mentoring Initiatives

Coaching and mentoring are imperative aspects of a strong leadership pipeline. So ideally, your leadership strategy should focus primarily on your current senior leaders who are prepared to nurture the potential future leaders across the team. In order to pursue this, you need to establish a Coaching and Mentoring program making it a responsibility for the senior leaders to coach the potential employees through informal and formal training.

Any productive coaching and mentoring program mainly emphasizes the rapport between the student and the coach. Hence, the leadership team of your organization should first take some time to interact and understand their potential peers. It is very important to establish trust and mutual respect for each other in the process. Once that is established, it is way easier to make them a part of the team and share industry expertise and other insights about the business. It also becomes easier for your senior leaders to coach the future leaders in role -specific hard skills and other operational parameters of the organization.

2. Leadership Development Programs

Establishing a leadership development program in the organization will help you to identify and develop new leaders from within the organization. This will help you to be prepared with trained individuals who can always step up when it is needed. Most of the organizations prefer to have leadership programs for the employees at the senior-level or they are voluntary i.e. for people who are willing to join such programs. However, it is always better to keep your leadership program open for all as it would give you a scope to create your pool of potential employees to fill suitable positions in your organization.

Leadership training can be extremely fruitful for front-line professionals in developing a strong leadership pipeline for the future. A good leadership program will maximize the individual contribution of an employee, improve the efficiency and drive focus for the organization. The mid- level leaders, who are focused on their work and reflect confidence, training on leadership can prove to be beneficial for them. It will also help them identify the potential of future leaders.

3. On-the-job Training Programs

We often have heard about on-the-job training during our MBA days. Well, that’s one of the most effective ways to shape up the leadership in the potential employees in the organization. In order to groom them, it’s always good to give them more responsibilities and face challenges through new assignments and situations. To grow as a leader, they need to experience real-time situations at the workplace. Your executive team must provide the necessary training required for a potential leader to grow.

4. Feedback is Important

One of the Gallup studies measured how the Millenials prefer to work. It revealed that consistent feedback and regular meetings are essential factors for them to improve performance and engagement. The survey also found that 44% of the Millennial employees engage when their respective managers meet them regularly and discuss insights. However, yet 21% of the Millenials meet their managers weekly.

As we already discussed, on-the-job training is important to prepare the employees for real time situations in the organization. However, without proper feedback, that is quite difficult to achieve. In fact, a lack of feedback can let the employee assume that his/her behaviour is accepted. So, providing constant feedback and assessment is a fundamental motivator for developing leaders.

But it is also essential to understand the impact of positive and negative feedback. For example, if positive feedback is not given in time, that may discourage an employee to flourish. At the same time, if you are not correcting poor performance of an employee, change cannot be expected.

5. Cross-Departmental Learning

Conflicts from competitions among teams are a usual occurrence in organizations. Creating opportunities in the leadership pipeline can prove to be a good approach for varied departments to work seamlessly. Your management team should be responsible for this. When various departments communicate and collaborate among them, each department has a better understanding of the other. They also tend to learn about the role of each department and their functionalities. They have an overall insight on how the organization functions.

Some of the cross- departmental ideas can be:

- Mentorship for Peers

- Training on Team Building

- Assignments on Job shadowing

- Cross-departmental projects

This kind of cross-departmental practices can increase the efficiency of the individuals and increase the productivity of the organization. Establishing a strong and effective leadership pipeline necessitates a continuing investment of time and energy. However, when built appropriately, it’s more than value the cost. Are you ready to start structuring your leadership pipeline?

Written By : Katharina