There’s little doubt that Human Resources (HR), Learning and Development (L&D), senior leadership teams, and even Board members are struggling to find the best organizing frameworks, governance structures, process integration points, incentive strategies, and development approaches to drive a consistent, integrated, and timely approach to building leadership capacity.

The research shows that many programs are in a state of transition because they have been fragmented and decentralized. As a result, senior leadership teams that have come through differing programs on their way up the corporate ladder have:

• Developed inconsistent sets of competencies.
• Adopted conflicting leadership styles.
• Received patchy exposure to diverse work experiences and business challenges.

A variety of corporate functions each play a role in selecting, developing, promoting, and retaining leadership talent. The image above offers a view of what leadership development looks like in many organizations today. 

There is often weak coordination and little integration among and between the groups, making it nearly impossible to enable a smooth, coordinated approach to building and maintaining a strong funnel of leadership talent. With processes in this state, it’s no wonder that a McKinsey study on leadership found that only 3% of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are satisfied with the speed at which they are able to select and develop future leaders.

The CorpU 8th Annual Benchmarking Report - Leadership Trends and Best Practices offers evidence that organizations are working to address these issues by:

However, few clear answers have yet emerged on the best approaches.  For example, there are at least 7 different organization functions that can “own” leadership development as shown in the chart below; none received a majority of the responses.

In many cases throughout the report, CorpU applies a lens to its data to find differences between organizations that are just “beginning” a transition from a traditional training department offering a catalogue of courses, to becoming a strategic function that is providing significant value to the organization by effectively managing the talent pool and the investments made from development.

As organizations mature along this transition curve, ownership for leadership development begins to move away from HR or a small team reporting directly to the CEO, and often into the corporate learning function.  The definition, purpose, and role of the newer “talent management” group are forming and anecdotal information suggests that these new talent functions may be assuming greater responsibility for leadership in the future.

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