As the pace of change continues to accelerate, organizations are finding it necessary to become more agile, to adapt their strategies quickly in response to sometimes unforeseen challenges, and to introduce large-scale transformation that is critical to their long-term viability. Organizations, however, are often unsuccessful in their efforts to pivot and sustain needed change, in large part because of the complexity involved in aligning culture, systems, and processes. In the end, this complexity is navigated largely by one resource: leaders. In order to drive change, these leaders must be equipped to shift their own behaviors. If they are not, no matter how well-intentioned they might be, leaders end up becoming a barrier to the very change they are trying to create. 

For this reason, organizations try many things such as: communications, standard training, enhancements to technology or processes, and competency models.  These approaches are important but may not always work because under the pressure of change, leaders are likely to resort to their “go to” approaches. Therefore, it is essential for organizations to design and execute a tangible plan that helps leaders move from where they were, to the new desired state that is critical to sustained business transformation.  

A leadership transformation strategy should be designed in the context of the business strategy, and leadership behaviors needed to support the strategy. Once those business strategy and leadership frameworks are defined, a process for transforming leaders should meet them where they are in their skill levels and perspectives using a tailored but scalable approach, which addresses all of the foundational elements known to be critical to sustained, measurable behavior change.

The Process in Action

In order to address all of these complications, a leader transformation program should engage the leader in building self-awareness of strengths and weaknesses relative to the needed leadership behaviors, promoting personal ownership for development, and designing and implementing a targeted leadership development plan with support and accountability for progress as well as next steps goals to sustain change long term. Specific steps should include:

Creating Self-Awareness via Assessment

In order to identify each leader’s strengths and development needs relative to the leadership behaviors needed for change, the program should use a well-designed and tailored assessment process that equips leaders with the understanding of how their style of leadership needs to shift and why.  This assessment should include input from key stakeholders – people who are knowledgeable about how the leader functions with his/her role.

Promoting Ownership

The program should promote ownership and generate buy-in from each leader by:

• Focusing on building rapport between the leader and his/her coach,
• Engaging the leader in reflecting on his/her assessment results to identify key themes,
• Identifying 1-2 development goals that the leader agrees are most important and is committed to addressing,
• Defining the leader’s personal vision for what successful execution of their development goals will look like, and,
• Working collaboratively with coaches to build their individual leadership development plans.

Designing a Leadership Development Plan to Grow Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

In order to address the necessary changes, each leader should have a clear and practical leadership development plan.  The purpose of the leadership development plan is to be a roadmap for change, clearly bridging the gap between self-awareness and sustained behavioral change.  When done correctly, the leadership development plan should narrow the leader’s focus, align with the leader’s learning style, and integrate with the leader’s day to day work activities.

In order to accomplish those goals, the leadership plan should include clear success measures (KPIs) that the leader has identified for him/herself.  These success measures allow the leader to measure the impact of their development efforts.

Finally, the leader should share his/her leadership development plan with his/her supervisor.  Together they should review overall assessment findings and get the supervisor’s input into and alignment on the leadership development plan.

Taking Action, Reflecting and Having Support

As the leader executes on the action steps in his/her leadership development plan, he/she will also need many opportunities to intentionally reflect on his/her progress.  This reflection should happen in three settings:

1. Individually: Leaders should regularly self-reflect and to document their successes, challenges, and areas of focus.
2. With a Coach: Leaders should also meet with a competent, knowledgeable leadership coach who can help the leader overcome challenges and build new habits and approaches. The coach should use the leadership development plan and the leader’s self-reflection notes to guide their conversation.
3. With the Leader’s Supervisor: Each leader’s supervisor should check-in with the leader in a regular cadence in order to provide job-specific feedback. 

Ensuring Accountability

Accountability is critical component to growth.  The leader should promote accountability in two ways:

• First, the leader should take ownership of his/her own accountability by creating a measurement document detailing what steps he/she is taking to execute on the key components (KPIs) of the leadership development plan.
• Second, the leader should intentionally seek feedback from others on their perceptions of his/her change. The leader should request feedback on his/her progress towards the key components from the leadership development plan from the same key stakeholders that provided feedback on the initial assessment.

Once that input is collected, the leader should review the results with his/her coach and share them with his/her supervisor.

Thinking Forward

Last, the leader should set future-focused development goals including specific development actions and next steps he/she will take to continue to momentum and sustain change after the leadership development program has ended. 

Results

One large organization implemented the type of leadership transformation approach described above and saw overwhelming success.  Over 120 leaders participated, each being rated by his/her manager on a 4-point scale (4 being high).  These ratings took place at the beginning and the end of the leadership transformation process.  At the conclusion, all 120+ leaders showed substantive improvement in their areas of focus.  Looking specifically at E4 behaviors, the key growth indicators were:

• An overall average gain of 3.4 points on a 4-point scale (4 being high)
• At a director level, participants’ average final rating was 3.44
• At a regional leadership level, participants’ average final rating was 3.5
• An overall average final rating of 44 on the same 4-point scale

In addition, leaders received comments that show the relevance and impact of leadership transformation such as:

…is making great strides in being a World-class Leader.

…is more open to change and seeing other points of view.

…has increased his active listening skills.

…more engaging/coaching instead of command and control.

…really helped get people to make decisions on their own, and feel good about making those decisions

…The leader from 10 years ago is a completely different leader than the leader today. He has made some great changes that I thought I would never see.

Conclusions

As organizations work to navigate new challenges and realities, being able to execute on a successful strategy for leadership development designed specifically to align with (and drive) transformational organizational change is more critical than ever. Organizations must be willing to acknowledge the vital role leaders play, and intentionally support them to ensure success of their transformation efforts.  In the same way that we ask leaders to adapt to and support organizational change, we must also be willing to adapt to and tailor our approaches to support leaders as they change. Using a clearly defined, openly tracked, high-touch, individualized system lays the groundwork for sustainable, long-term transformation.