Architecting a Comprehensive Leadership Development Framework

When these shifts emerge more gradually, leadership will set an agenda for new employee behaviors that must be enhanced in order to address the changing landscape. These changes are most likely significant enough to mandate a large-scale initiative, either for a line of business, a common employee population or an entire enterprise. A few examples would include developing change management skills to accelerate the integration of a merger, introducing new innovation models when product lines are near the end of their maturity cycle or investing in team-building and partnering skills for a business now dependent on cross-organizational selling or coordination.

These critical organizational initiatives should come from the CEO, must be tackled one at a time, and always go to the top of leadership development agendas for the year.

Organizational Competencies and the Leadership Pipeline: This element of a leadership development curriculum is most common within corporate universities and reflects the “leadership pipeline.” A core set of organization-wide competencies are defined (vertical columns), and then translated into their practical application for employees at different levels of management (the crossing pipes). Organization-wide competencies are defined by a committee of the company’s senior leadership and generally include categories such as develops winning strategies, customer-focused, delivers results, drives change, builds relationships, develops diverse talent, demonstrates excellence and behaves ethically. These virtues are established by each organization as the characteristics that distinguish them from others and support the behaviors behind their competitive differentiation.

Within the different stages of management, these competencies are tailored to meet the appropriate needs for employees at each level of the pipeline. For example, the organizational competency “builds relationships” might mean “one-on-one communication skills” for individual contributors, “team-building” for managers and “managing partnerships and alliances” for business leaders. This interpretation makes it possible to apply fewer, more universal values to specific, tactical roles and job requirements.