Leadership development reaching a ‘crisis point’

Executives need to make it a priority

Leadership development is on everybody’s lips but when it comes to actually walking the talk, very little gets done and the situation is reaching a crisis point, according to the honourary chairman of the Canadian Society for Training and Development’s Learn@Work Week.

“There’s a huge number of experienced people leaving organizations and a sense that we haven’t done enough to develop the leaders of the future,” said Courtney Pratt, who is also the chairman of Hamilton-based steel manufacturer Stelco.

As part of Learn@Work Week in September, executives from public, private and not-for-profit organizations gathered at the National Club in Toronto to figure out why leadership development is one of the first things to be cut when an organization hits hard times, even though chief executive officers say it’s a priority.

One of the answers that came out of the symposium was leadership development isn’t actually a top priority for executives. If organizations want to change that, executives need to be held accountable for making leadership development happen, said Pratt.

“If you want CEOs to take it seriously, you had better make it one of their objectives and you had better compensate them for it,” he said.

While the shift in demographics raises the urgency to develop the next generation of leaders, the different generations also have different views of what a successful career looks like, said Pratt.

“Younger people coming into organizations put different values on different things,” he said. “There’s a need to consciously create a dialogue between the two groups. Too often the dialogue is one way. It’s the old guard telling the young people, ‘Here’s how it works and here’s the formula for success.’”

The results of the symposium will be released in a white paper before the end of the year.

Events such as Learn@Work Week and the leadership symposium raise awareness of learning as a valid business issue, said Pratt.

“Learning is a little bit like leadership. It’s something we all recognize as important… but we’re not doing enough. We’re falling behind, we’re not investing enough,” he said.

Learning is a big part of the job at Novopharm, a Toronto-based pharmaceutical company. In addition to compliance, quality control and professional development training, every time a new operational process is introduced, employees involved in that process need to be trained, said Sheri Phillips, the company’s manager of training and development. From January until the beginning of September, there were 150 process changes at Novopharm.

The company recently implemented a new online learning system with e-learning programs, which has saved the company about $60,000 in training costs in the past year, said Phillips, who also attended the leadership symposium.

The benefits of the new system extend beyond cost savings, said Phillips.

“We’ve been able to decrease the number of hours employees spend on training and yet make the training more interactive and engaging,” she said.

Managers and supervisors can also easily search the system to find out if an employee has been trained on a particular process or compliance issue.

“There’s more information and data available so they can manage their staff more effectively,” said Phillips.

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