Developing High-Potential Leaders Step #3: Alignment with business results

Richard Hodge here. Thanks for hanging in with us and moving on to Truth #3: The most successful programs are integrated with the business strategy, results, and culture.

Aligning the development activities and processes with your HIPO program with the most important strategies, initiatives, and key results of the organization is critical. It is not enough to just develop our high-potential employees to be better leaders. They need to do this in the context of the real work and workstreams they operate within.

Some organizations we talked to you actually tune the development content and priorities of each of their high-potential cohorts with the specific strategies and gaps in the organization's current capabilities on an annual basis. It's about being real and relevant.  It focuses the learning on what will make a difference – and now.

The best seem to do the following:

• Align the leadership development strategy with the business strategy.
• The C-suite and senior leadership participates in annual development strategy mapping sessions around current and emerging initiatives and imperatives.
• They identified the key roles and playbooks for future needs that will be required to achieve the results of the future, not just the present .
• In all action learning and Innovation projects, have leadership sponsorship, review, and backed execution where and as appropriate.
• Culture and context matter. Make sure the how we do things gets addressed, not just the what we need to do.
• And finally, they keep score. They keep a focus on key metrics like performance results, bench strength, retention, time to production, and in some cases even ROI.

So be practical. Focus on results, measure success along the journey, and make sure what your HIPOs are learning can be and is applied to achieve the most important results your organization cares about.

And  by the way be sure to login live and review our webinar about practical, pragmatic development with your new and existing HIPO programs.