Curriculum

• Step 1: Reflecting on Future Leadership Needs

  • Online individual work: As individuals, you will reflect on your organization’s strengths and weaknesses related to talent development. You will also consider your organization’s strategic priorities and how talent will need to change over time.
  • Live team workshop: As a leadership team, you will reflect on your organization’s current approach to talent development and align on how leadership in your organization will need to evolve to achieve your strategic goals. Finally, you will discuss how to communicate about this program with others in your organization.

• Step 2: Identifying Core and Leadership Competencies

  • Online individual work: You will learn about different core and leadership competencies (skills and mindsets), and nominate the competencies you think should be on your team’s starter list.
  • Live team workshop: As a team, you will select the core and leadership competencies that will be at the heart of your organization’s development process. As you do this, you’ll refer back to what you discovered in step 1 (i.e., what leadership will need to look like to help your organization achieve its strategic goals).

• Step 3: Identifying Development Priorities for Direct Reports

  • Online individual work: You will learn how to use competencies to assess your direct reports, while actively mitigating against bias. Based on this assessment, you will identify two or three development priorities for your direct report(s).
  • Live team workshop:  As a team, you will compare development priorities to identify themes and patterns. You’ll also discuss how you assessed your direct reports to ensure everyone is using the competencies in the same way.

• Step 4: Crafting Development Activities for Direct Reports

  • Online individual work: You will learn about the 70/20/10 development principle and review examples of development plans. As individuals, you will create development activities for your direct report(s).
  • Live team workshop: As a team, you will share development activities to identify themes and patterns and improve everyone’s draft plans. You’ll also identify potential areas for investing in the development of all of your staff.

• Step 5: Co-creating Development Plans with Direct Reports

  • Online individual work: After learning best practices on development plan conversations, you will have an initial conversation with your direct reports to introduce them to this new approach to development planning. You will also discuss how you hope to continue these development conversations moving forward (e.g., frequency and cadence of conversations).
  • Live team workshop: During this last session, each leadership team member will provide debriefs of their initial conversations with their direct reports. This process will help your team surface potential challenges that might arise when rolling out the development approach to the broader organization. You will also create a plan for rolling out this process across your full organization over the next few months. Aligning on the cadence of critical activities (e.g., frequency of refining development plans with direct reports, or how often you will revisit organizational investments) will help ensure that the new talent development process is standard across the organization.