Developing future-ready leaders: Executive perspectives on where it’s going wrong

Companies are finding it ever harder to attract and retain the employees they need at any level, including leadership. Even in the face of layoffs in some industries, good leaders are harder to find than ever. In part, this is because what it takes to lead successfully is changing so rapidly, and in part it’s because of many executives’ reduced interest in taking on the stress and complexity of senior leadership roles.

Companies that want to give themselves the best chance of having the leaders they will need in the long term must pivot to retention. This means aligning their purpose, their strategic scenarios, their executive skills and capabilities, and their executive development and succession planning into a clear and holistic executive retention strategy that will help them build their leadership bench from within.

In that context, we recently surveyed leaders in HR and in other functions to understand more about how companies develop their leaders and how well those processes are working.¹ The data suggests a strong focus on retaining and promoting leaders—as well as significant room for improvement in how companies are doing so.

View the full infographic here

Questions leaders can ask to jumpstart their leadership development efforts

1. How successful are we, really, in ensuring we have the leaders we need and will need? How do we know?  
2. How far into the future do we look? How many different strategic scenarios do we plan for?
3. Do our succession efforts go deep enough into our organization to really plan for those scenarios? To identify, develop, and seek to retain potential leaders we know we’ll need?
4. Do our executive development and succession planning efforts support the more personalized, networked, and dynamic career paths many executives are seeking today?
5. How aligned are our executive assessment, L&D, and succession planning efforts today? How can we ensure we know enough about our people to understand who we most need to retain—and make sure those people know we value them?

Reference

¹ In the spring and summer of 2022, we conducted online, anonymous surveys of a total of 251 HR leaders and 150 executives in other functions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.