Ensuring you have the right leadership pipeline to safeguard future growth.
Astute leaders understand the importance of ensuring their leadership pipeline strategy incorporates both their organization’s environment and corporate culture, as well as the leadership capabilities needed to deliver on current and future business strategies, growth plans, and financial success.
Your leadership pipeline strategy should be a priority across the entire organization, requiring all leaders and managers to be accountable for the continuous talent development of their respective team members. 
It also means leaders at all levels of your organization should be competent in modeling, coaching, teaching, and reinforcing leadership behaviors and competencies.
Shortfalls in your internal leadership pipeline will grow and accumulate over time, eventually evolving into leadership gaps that prevent the full achievement of future business objectives.
Organizations, particularly privately owned companies and SMEs, experiencing rapid growth are typically too busy chasing new opportunities, markets, and strategic partnerships to focus on leadership development. This is a mistake.
Developing Leadership Skills Across Your Organization
Periods of high revenue growth often mask shortcomings in talent development. Gaps in existing leadership skills and competencies tend to go unnoticed when revenue is rapidly increasing year after year. It is only when growth suddenly declines that company owners and leaders become acutely aware of the significant shortfalls in leadership talent at all levels of the organization creating a bottleneck to continued growth. Don’t let this happen to you.
As Zur Shapiro, William Berkeley Professor of Entrepreneurship at NYU’s Stern School of Management has noted, “In chasing growth, it’s easy to overlook the people issues.” Do not let this error be the root cause of unsatisfactory future performance.
Without a strategic focus on employee engagement, talent development, and succession planning, you will not have the resources in place to sustain today’s rapid growth.
And, unfortunately, by the time slower growth provides the time for senior executives to focus on leadership development, too many highly performing and burnt out employees will have moved on to other opportunities that provide them with the professional development growth they desire (this is particularly true for the millennial generation).
Speaking of which, Millennials want to grow. They want to be developed, through both formal training programs and from coaching by their managers and leaders.
Training and coaching are critical to keeping your millennial generation workers motivated and engaged. Plus, this reduces the cost of employee turnover as team members who are being trained, developed, and groomed for promotion are less likely to leave.
To read more on this topic, download our free article Leadership Pipeline Mistakes.
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