Securing the Future: Cultivating a Strong Leadership Pipeline with Strategic Alignment

As volatility and uncertainty rise across sectors, it’s critical to future-proof your organization by knowing how your current leadership talent pool lines up with fast-changing role requirements; optimizing the mix of internal advancement and external hires based on your current and projected needs; and using a comprehensive leadership strategy alignment system to handle those and other challenges.  

Heidrick & Struggles has developed deep expertise in how to future-proof leadership, largely through cutting-edge digital solutions. Organizations like yours need a leadership strategy alignment system that enables leadership capabilities to grow with your strategies and objectives. Heidrick Navigator provides optimal tools and insights to form the core of such a system.  

The Need for Innovative Leaders Who Make Fast, Strategy-aligned Decisions 

The definition of effective leadership has become a fast-moving target. While there is always a need for interpersonal skills, the ability to generate innovative strategies, integrate digital technologies, and foresee trends, including competition and disruption, has become more important. In most cases, we see our clients hiring leaders with potential and ability to learn even if they are a step up in terms of hard skills. 

In this dynamic context, you need current and rising leaders with a full set of skills across key areas. That requires a leadership strategy through which you can understand the people, skills, and capabilities currently in place while ensuring an internal full pipeline of those ready to step in and drive immediate results. 

More specifically, you need a system with mutually reinforcing components to drive leadership talent strategy alignment, including in these key areas:   

• Getting a full picture of existing leadership talent against changing role requirements and internal and external challenges 
• Managing leadership changes (such as internal advancement) and the integration of a potentially large, growing group of external hires 
• Developing a dynamic, strategic task force or other forward-looking groups that can plan for and support the future state of the business with a focus on leadership strategy alignment 
• Supporting the constant need for leaders who are capable, innovative, and empowered to make decisions quickly in response to shifting internal factors and environmental conditions 

To get those right, legacy leadership management systems simply aren’t sufficient. But it can be daunting to give up the traditional and move on from the status quo. 

The best approach is to keep core principles of leadership management in place—such as seeking to advance and hire leaders whose values match those of your business—while integrating a more cutting-edge, digital solution to truly future-proof your business for the good of your stakeholders. 

That’s where Heidrick Navigator offers the ideal leadership strategy alignment system.

Heidrick Navigator: Optimize Your Leadership Strategy Alignment System  

Heidrick Navigator provides a research-backed, high-quality digital solution to power your leadership strategy alignment system.  

The platform generates key metrics, reports, and insights to assess your current and rising leadership talent to ensure you are fully ready for current and future challenges and opportunities. Among these deliverables are:   

Leadership overview report

This report provides a comprehensive view of your current leadership talent across the dimensions that matter most, so you can align advancement and hiring plans with current and future needs, with knowledge of key gaps. 

Successors

Heidrick Navigator presents rising leaders in three categories—Ready Now, Ready Soon, Ready Later—so you can address attrition of any kind and plan succession strategically.  

Updated resumes

Whether you need to view resumes of current leadership or rising leaders or share these with external parties, Heidrick Navigator keeps them all in one place. 

Assessment results

Heidrick Navigator provides instantly available results of ongoing leadership assessments on leadership talent dimensions, including business impact, leadership capabilities, leadership potential, and culture impact, in line with the Heidrick Leadership Framework. You’ll have complete knowledge of the leaders you have and those you may need.  

Matching algorithm

Match people at all levels to roles more efficiently and effectively with Heidrick Navigator’s proven algorithm for better fit, results, and morale. 

Unconventional matches

Sometimes the best fit for a leadership role is a surprising one; Heidrick Navigator reveals these high value matches more easily than traditional systems and intuition. 

Internal-to-external hires planning

Use Heidrick Navigator results and insights to gauge internal leader advancement against external hiring needs, such as understanding the ongoing ratio of internal to external hires, and to plan onboarding and other activities proactively for external hires.  

Develop leadership ability

Heidrick Navigator generates assessments of key leadership-skill strengths and gaps, to help you develop leaders on dimensions needed, to align with the organization’s objectives, needs, and challenges 

Based on those deliverables, a leadership intelligence platform like Heidrick Navigator will help you with critical leadership strategy alignment activities, including:  

• Establishing analytics-driven, balanced building of leadership talent in-house, rather than relying largely on recruiting new leaders through external hires 
• Defining optimal leader role profiles needed to maximize impact and performance during an anticipated or unanticipated business shift 
• Detailing leadership recommendations by assessing and mapping leaders against new, needed role profiles 
• Developing strategic succession plans that match rising leadership talent with near-term roles to fill 
• Creating comprehensive leadership development programs that target the most critical skills for established and rising leaders to gain, in line with strategic priorities  

Effective leadership strategy alignment is crucial to business performance on every dimension, from financial results to workforce morale. 

Heidrick Navigator provides a comprehensive digital solution to view, understand, develop, and align your leadership talent with your business and its shifting needs, to drive and sustain impact for the long term, as part of a future-proof organization.