:: Findings Summary ::

Results of the two studies showed startling conditions in the state of leadership development in many organizations.

	1.	Weak Leadership Culture: Senior leaders are telling their organizations that leadership development is important and leaders should be developing their team members. However, meeting short-term financial targets almost always takes precedence over longer-term objectives to develop leadership talent. As a result, leaders are not eagerly releasing people for developmental assignments.
	2.	Lack of Integrated Processes: Leadership talent identification, selection, and development processes are still highly fragmented and no single approach emerges as a solid best practice. CorpU found only a few rare occasions when a strong majority of survey respondents agreed on any specific leadership development practice, organizing structures, or accountabilities for leadership programs.  There are no off-the-shelf technology solutions that adequately integrate activities for managing the leadership supply chain.
	3.	Inadequate Transparency to Talent Across the Enterprise: Without integrated technology, companies are unable to get a clear view of the leadership talent that exists across the enterprise.  Most organizations bring business unit leaders together for intense candidate review sessions, which include mostly anecdotal reports on the performance of high potentials and very little quantitative information to help distinguish the capabilities from one potential leader to another.
	4.	Poor Efficacy of Programs: Many organizations report less than shining success for action learning efforts, leader-as-teacher programs, and rotational and stretch assignments.  Organizations with weak or no governance structure are less successful than those with strong governance.  The reason for this seems obvious because the more leaders feel committed to learning and development through their oversight of L&D goals, the more likely they are to participate in programs in a meaningful way.  Some organizations also need more time under their belts with these commonly adopted programs to find the right set of conditions that are required to make their own versions of these programs work.

Findings in this report provide insight into why these conditions are present and why some prevail even when they seem to contradict logic and common sense. The 8th Annual Benchmarking Report - Leadership Trends and Best Practices also offers innovations in leadership development that stood out as ground breaking new ways that some forward-thinking organizations have developed to confront the leadership crisis.

 

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