What Are the Challenges of Leadership Development Programs?

I’ve had my share of training budding leaders in the past, all the way back during my military days to my current exploits as an entrepreneur. One thing stands out in all my experiences — you must invest in your top people to bring out the best in them and make them want to stay. In business, this is crucial in ensuring your company stays on top of the game in a fast-paced, dynamic, and unforgiving environment. 

The challenges of leadership development programs include budget constraints and generic programs with a standardized or outdated approach irrelevant and unsuitable to your situation. You must also ensure you can entice top talents to stay by providing them opportunities to apply their learnings. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the challenges of empowering your most promising employees through leadership development programs. We’ll talk about how you can work around a tight budget, why it’s crucial to provide growth opportunities for your best people, and how important it is to have programs suited to your company’s unique needs. We’ll also discuss some of the biggest mistakes to avoid so you can reap maximum benefits for your business. 

Are Leadership Development Programs Essential?

Leadership development programs are essential in building a great organization. Developing and enhancing leadership competencies among your current and rising leaders results in a better, more efficient working environment for everyone. It also gives your business a competitive advantage.

Biggest Mistakes in Leadership Development

Leadership development is a long-term commitment. It’s easy to fall short of expectations and requirements, so you must be aware of its common pitfalls so you’ll know exactly what to do to avoid falling into their traps.

Here are 2 of the biggest mistakes in leadership development:

Not Setting Clear and Specific Objectives

If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how do you plan accurate routes to reach your destination? Say you want to spend the day at the beach. You don’t just jump behind the wheel of your car and drive off into the sunset. You must first decide which beach to go to and figure out the best route to get there. 

The same goes for leadership development. You must plot clear and specific goals so you can accurately focus on intentional and strategic plans of action. Consider setting SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound — so participants will have a firm grasp on the program and understand the value of investing their time in this endeavor.

Not Including Senior Leaders

I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” If you regard this as true and apply this in the way you approach leadership development in your business, chances are your senior leaders will get left behind in today’s fast-paced, dynamic environment. 

You might say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but having this mindset puts your business at risk of falling prey to poor leadership, bad decisions, and a lack of effective, relevant strategies. 

Include your senior managers in your leadership development programs, perhaps even in the planning stages, and encourage them to actively participate and be open-minded about change. You can also engage them as speakers so they can be credible sources of authentic experiences from which others can learn valuable lessons. Their storytelling abilities will undoubtedly pique the interest of the audience. 

Benefits of Having Leadership Development Programs in Place

Leadership development programs help individuals sharpen their skills and become more confident in taking on a leadership role in the organization. It comes with many benefits, including:

• Improved employee morale
• Increased employee loyalty and retention
• Enhanced productivity
• Enhanced team collaboration
• Emergence of better leaders
• Improves your company’s bottom line
• Increased likelihood of attracting top talent
• Increased probability of success in spearheading and navigating change

When it comes to developing current leaders, in particular, a survey conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership among more than 5,000 leadership development program participants revealed that 99% realized their set goals pertaining to critical leadership aspects, such as self-awareness, effective communication, and efficient implementation of change.

Additionally, 97% of the respondents reported these benefits: 

• Better preparation for more compelling leadership roles and responsibilities
• Adequate readiness to face leadership challenges ahead
• Enhanced openness to collaboration, diversity, and innovative approaches to managing teams 

Challenges of Leadership Development Programs

Implementing a leadership development program for your business is no walk in the park. It entails difficulties and obstacles that you must be prepared and equipped to face.

Here are some of the biggest challenges of having leadership development programs in place:

1. Proliferation of Generic Programs

Most leadership development programs utilize a standardized approach targeted to the general population. The danger with these programs is that you fail to achieve the results you initially aimed for despite investing money, time, and effort. Ultimately, you might settle for mediocrity, assuming this is the best that could be achieved.

Generic programs may also be outdated. Remember, the business and leadership landscape continuously evolves. New strategies and leadership techniques have been developed, and technology is now integral to business management and solutions. Furthermore, the problems and challenges faced by today’s leaders differ significantly from those encountered by leaders in the past. 

To make your leadership development programs highly practical and relevant, they must be tailor-fitted to your company’s needs and to the unique personalities and goals of the individuals involved. You must also identify the specific issues and challenges your business deals with.

One way to accomplish this is to partner with a leadership training specialist who can help customize your leadership development program. At Sancus Leadership, we can help design a relevant and effective program for your current and budding leaders so your business will continue to thrive and succeed in a dynamic, demanding industry. When you’re ready to take this crucial step, book us a free leadership call, and we’ll get started right away!

2. Lack of Proper Application

Learnings and experiences will only be successful if they are suitably applied in various workplace scenarios. Some leaders mistakenly think it’s all about learning leadership laws, best practices, and industry standards. However, these are all merely theoretical. 

Practical application is necessary to ensure the success of your leadership development program. It’s a great way to track your progress, results, and success rate regarding goal achievement. 

It’s like learning about Bill Gates’ tricks of the trade for taking his business all the way to the top. None of these will really make sense to you if you’re not in the same industry experiencing the same situations. All these learnings will be abstract and impractical, with no real value.  

3. Budget Constraints

Training entails expenses. Leadership development, in particular, can get pretty expensive, especially when you decide to go all out. Books, modules, technology, manpower, and time required — all these come with additional expenses for the company.

A tip I can share is maximizing your available resources to cut costs. Consider these approaches:

• Coaching/mentoring: Tapping your best leaders to train newbies is a great way to share internal know-how and best practices. This strategy benefits both mentors and mentees — mentees enjoy the opportunity to be taught by seasoned leaders, while mentors get the chance to sharpen their leadership competencies. 
• Stretch assignments: These are tasks you assign to program participants that are currently beyond their skill level. This is excellent on-the-job training for them, plus you get the opportunity to show your best people that you’re eager to invest in them. For instance, cross-functional projects between departments are an excellent way to level up your leaders’ skills and boost engagement as well.

4. Enticing Top Talents To Stay

Your company’s leadership development programs must be at par with market expectations and trends to help ensure good leaders will want to stay loyal to the company. According to the Work Institute’s 2021 Mid-Year Retention Report, career-related reasons accounted for 21.1% of the reasons employees left their jobs — the number one cause.
This indicates that you must focus on providing professional and advancement opportunities for your best people to entice them to stay. The best people are keen on staying with employers who will invest in them and support them as they grow in their careers and reach their full potential.