In today's rapidly changing work environment, organisations are navigating economic uncertainty, new work models, and the introduction of new technologies. This dynamic environment is causing leaders to struggle to keep up.
Leadership burnout has become a critical issue, with a staggering 72% of leaders reporting exhaustion in 2023, which is a significant increase from 60% just three years ago. As leaders try to keep up with constant change, many find themselves overwhelmed, making it difficult to maintain resillience and clarity. This increase in burnout emphasises the urgent need for organisations to reconsider how they support and prepare their leaders for the future.
Additionally, trust in business leaders has declined from 80% in 2022 to 69% in 2024. This decline is attributed to unfulfilled promises regarding career growth, lack of transparency, and unequal treatment within organisations.
With such a high demand for leadership talent and a clear struggle to retain these individuals, it is challenging to know where to start when filling leadership roles and ensuring you have the right people for future needs.
Overcoming the challenge of leadership succession planning
As your highly skilled and valuable employees are opting for different career paths, early retirement, or being recruited by competing companies, it is becoming increasingly challenging to fill the resulting skills gaps. You may find it difficult to plan for the future of your organisation and to propel it towards its growth targets. Leadership development continues to be a major concern for organisations, with 83% recognising its significance.
In addition, an overwhelming number of managers and employees are considering quiting their jobs in 2024. Globally, about 46% of workers are eyeing an exit, which is even higher than during the height of the "Great Resignation" in 2021. This has meant having to be more resourceful when it comes to filling gaps in skills and resources and looking outside the box for solutions. For example, you may have considered the following:
- Agencies
- Headhunters
- Competitive perks
What if your current employees have the potential to fill these positions? What if, with the help of targeted development, leadership coaching, and mentoring, you can unlock talent and enjoy the benefits of investing in your own team?
According to Fit Small Business, the average time to hire for internal recruitment is around 2-3 weeks compared with 1-3 months for external hires. What’s more, turnover for internal recruitment is nominal whereas this is around 20% within the first two months for external hires. Costs can also be between four and six times higher for external recruitment.
It's time to consider how L&D professionals can strategically invest in leadership development, reaping the benefits of loyalty and retention with the people they've invested in.
How learning technologies can help develop leadership talent
One major challenge is identifying individuals in our organisations who have the potential to fill certain roles. We need to understand their competencies, the requirements of the roles, and any existing gaps. We also need to identify who is ready now or will be ready soon. Lastly, we need to figure out how to help them develop the necessary skills.
Talent management and performance management platforms, whether standalone or integrated into your HR system, have been in use for some time. However, there is a recent trend where the learning technologies used to deliver and track learning programmes are starting to include talent and performance tools. This allows L&D professionals to collaborate with HR and participate in discussions about performance management and employee development.
This trend has been highlighted by Fosway, which sheds light on how the wider, talent-oriented view is becoming “a consistent feature of organisations’ buying decisions behind their LMS and other learning systems”.
Some of these emerging tools include competency frameworks and success profiles, such as those in Thinqi’s smarter learning system, where you can define the criteria a person needs to fulfil a role successfully. This is not limited to specific knowledge or experience – this could also cover any competencies you define as essential for the role. It could also include those valuable soft skills such as leadership capability or emotional intelligence.
These tools help people to achieve their true potential. These are most often the people who have been at your organisation for a few years and who have demonstrated loyalty and trust.
Now it’s about seeing how far they can go in your organisation.
Underpinning this is a framework for competencies. This is about understanding your organisational competencies, putting them into a taxonomy and making sure they are aligned with the ethos of your organisation.
How to connect talent and performance management with your learning programmes
Let’s take a look at how you can bring together talent and performance management with the delivery of your learning programmes.
To support people in achieving their potential and fulfilling critical roles, you need to define the competencies needed for each role, diagnose the gaps between the individual and the role, and then join the dots with effective learning programmes.
This doesn’t have to be complicated if you can break it down with a bit of careful planning around the following actions.
Outline your competency frameworks
A good place to start, if you haven’t already, is to create a competency framework for the roles within your organisation. This should provide a complete picture of the competencies required for the organisation to achieve success.
First, identify and represent their existing competencies in a digital system. What competencies do people have currently?
Create competency profiles
After updating their competency profile, your employees can explore the success profiles in your directory. They can then assess themselves against the requirements for different roles. This enables them to think beyond a traditional career path and evaluate their current skills. They can identify available opportunities, determine how close they are to their desired role, and plan the necessary steps to reach it.
Additionally, you can utilise tools like 360 evaluations to understand the variance between how individuals perceive their own capabilities and how they are perceived by their peers and managers.
Map out what a successful leader looks like
Next, you can start to map out your success profiles. Which of the competencies do each of your job roles need? This will put you in good stead for filling roles and measuring your people against their existing or aspirational role.
You could start a pilot project by taking one role you wish to fill and seeing how many people are close to this profile. You can then nurture this talent pool to bring them to a state of readiness to fulfil that role.
Award the successful application of leadership competencies
You can provide people with a pathway of learning as part of a rich, blended learning journey with the observational awarding of competencies. Note that someone (e.g. a line manager) will need to validate this.
The ‘Badges’ feature in Thinqi can be used to empower line managers with the ability to award people who are demonstrating successful application of the learning to their daily work (for more on this, check out our blog post on the importance of learning transfer).
Use evaluation and reporting
Your talent management tools should also let you run reports across your organisation against the success profiles you’ve created. This allows you to target audiences or identify who in the business is ‘ready now’ (i.e. fulfils all the required competencies) or ‘ready soon’ (i.e. fulfils many of the competencies, but not all).
This is an effective way to see how healthy your succession pipeline is, where you are exposed and how prepared you are to fill critical roles from within.
Prescribe relevant learning pathways
Once an individual has checked their competency profile against the desired success profiles, you can link any missing competencies to programmes of learning to help fill the gaps.
Your learning programmes can consist of workshops, coaching, mentoring, or blended learning experiences designed to address specific competencies. Learners can identify these programmes through your platform and enroll themselves. Alternatively, you can identify a cohort of individuals who are almost ready to take that step into leadership and put them on the relevant pathway to develop any missing competencies.
In summary…
New talent management functionality in today’s learning systems will help you nurture talent to not only future-proof your organisation, but to ensure everyone has the opportunity to achieve their ambitions.
