Monitor and Improve Practices

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Summary

Of all the tasks involved in setting up and operating a leadership development program, maintaining its "cruising speed" is among the most difficult. One reliable way to keep the momentum going is to continuously monitor your leadership development processes, just as you would any of your organization’s other critical functions, to learn which processes work and which could be improved.

Monitoring and Improving Leadership Development Practices
The goal of monitoring is simple: to help you learn whether your efforts are producing the leaders you will need. Where the efforts are falling short, you want to find out why and fix what isn’t working. Where efforts are going well, you want do more of the same.

Hold Yourself Accountable with an Implementation Plan
Summarize the specific actions and initiatives you’re taking to build up the leadership pipeline. You can then start to determine whether those actions are having the desired effect. One way to organize your summary is in a table that outlines your leadership development priorities.

Discovering the Critical Success Traits of Your Best Hires
In addition to setting clear goals and implementing toward them, your organization can conduct broader learning investigations that will guide leadership development decisions going forward. For example, you can use this template to brainstorm the key traits shared by your organization’s top performers, and use those traits to help identify other promising future leaders.