Leadership development spending has lagged, forcing companies to lose key managers and leaders at an unprecedented rate.
It’s easy to write off leadership development and say it’s just a “nice to have.” Well that’s simply not true. If you don’t talk about leadership, bring leaders together, and set in place a set of behaviors, values, and skills for your leaders, the company sits on shifting sand. As one of our analysts put it to me years ago, when things get bad the only thing you have left is the leadership culture. And if you haven’t been taking care of it, well, you just drift.
I’m not saying leadership development is easy. It’s actually quite tricky, in fact. There are thousands of books, courses, and vendors selling you models, tools, and content. And most of them have lots of good research underpinnings. What really matters is not just “buying one,” but rather looking at them and deciding what models and values work for you.'
New research from Josh Bersin and Better Up shows something that I've been concerned about for some time. That companies are massively underinvesting in leadership development.
Leadership development is not just a “nice to have.” When you get down to basics in a hyper-ambiguous and disruptive world, leadership culture and purpose may be the only things you have to really guide you and if you've underinvested you're in big trouble.
What's more, adjacent research into the impact of HR capabilities shows that Leadership and Management Development have the highest impact of all HR capabilities when measured against business growth. And as this infographic shows the effects of good practice are far-reaching.
Leadership Development is not usually easy. Plug and play solutions often fail to hit the mark and there's a lot of different people and approaches to choose from. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't invest in it. If you are responsible for budgeting in your organization, make sure you allocate sufficient funds to it and use this kind of data to justify your decisions.