This may sound like an overstatement but there is not a day in my life when I do not read or hear (in prominent news media) of one business head or the other bemoan the shortage of quality leaders in their business. I ask my human resources (HR) colleagues of their biggest challenge and it is the same concern there, too.

You dive a little deeper and you discover that despite the best efforts of the business in terms of learning and development, the need for leadership talent is somewhat universal across industry. And the need is not just for leaders as business heads but across levels, be it a first time manager or a seasoned leader. It is indeed a pity that only very few Indian organisations have got their ‘leadership development’ act right, while most seem to struggle.

The ‘right’ moves

I gather it is not for want of trying. It is commonplace to find organisations doing the ‘right’ things in terms of investing in people. Be it sending people to resource-demanding training programmes or engaging with leading consultants for development assessment, working on capability enhancement or shaping a personal development plan, and in more recent times, hiring coaches to enhance performance or for development. Organisations seem to do it all and with great vigour. But, alas, this whole effort seems to fall woefully short when it comes to finding people for specific leadership roles — forcing organisations to find their answers mostly outside and not inside!

What is the cause for this failure? How can organisations cultivate a sustainable leadership model or a leadership engine that identifies, develops and powers leaders? What follows is my hypothesis, which presents some key steps involved in getting it right.

As most of us know, all human creations happen twice — once in the mind and then in the physical form. The same is true for the leadership engine, too. The first step begins with what I call a ‘leadership mindset’. Leadership development has to begin in the mind of the business leaders first. What is leadership mindset? It is about cultivating openness to development of leaders, recognising the longer term needs of the business and being ready to personally invest time and energy in adopting successful ideas and practices to promote development of leaders. So, the operative word here is really about personal investment of time and attention. In its manifest form, it would be about focusing time and resources in having deep and authentic conversations with colleagues on their experiences, their successes and challenges, their aspirations and the legacy they wish to leave behind and to be able to shape from it a future forward view of who can be the leaders of tomorrow and what would make them so.

This is the starting point of a successful leadership engine. It is the prime mover. After all, in a funny sense, it is perhaps because of some visionary leaders that many in senior roles are where they are — they had the ‘leadership mindset’ and, clearly, it was not at the cost of business but with a view to enable business to greater heights!

Identify candidates

Moving on, I think that organisations that have been successful with leadership development are those which have also got two other supporting acts right — identification of the potential candidates for leadership and working through what I call the targeted capabilities for those potential leaders.

Often, in organisations, the existing groups of leaders have a point of view on who they think could be potential leaders — perhaps, their own subordinates or possibly a person who is showing good performance. So, there is, in the minds of these individuals certain behaviours which seem to qualify people for potential leadership roles. Now, what does not happen and by corollary what is required for successful leadership development is ‘to bring these views together and to mobilise a shared view of who could be the leaders’. This calls for the minds to come together and that happens when they are open, willing to receive as well as to give.

The shared view on potential leaders would give the leadership and development (L&D) process sufficient strength and robustness. Because it is a shared view everyone will back the candidates identified and provide the necessary support. It would ensure that the energy and investment stays focused on the identified people. This is the second pillar on which the leadership engine rests.

In the whole process of identifying potential leaders, the softer side of getting a ‘shared view on potential leaders’ is more critical than the hard piece, which is about the GATE questions (the threshold that potential leaders need to get through), the criteria for selection, potential assessment and so on.

Need for clarity

The third pillar is the ‘clarity on targeted capabilities’. Often people are sent to programmes or assigned to development projects without a clear end in view. The outputs in terms of ‘behaviours’ that are expected from them is not clarified either.

The actors seem to be comfortable handling the haziness, be it the manager (who is nominating the particular individual for the programme) or the learning event or the individual himself or the L&D function. It appears to be an act of faith which is left to find its own relevance at work. Surely, no other investment in business is carried out with such generosity!

Successful organisations, in my experience, pay considerable attention and interest to this part. They spend hours addressing the question: what should happen after the development? And in defining the outputs. This ensures that the development can be measured and tracked against the outcomes. An outside-in rather than an inside-out approach.

If there is one lesson that I have learnt about making leadership development succeed in an organisation, then it is about leaders having a leadership mindset and steering it though a fabric of knowing what the business needs and inspiring people to discover their real potential! If you are setting out on this journey, I urge you to make sure your commitment is likewise.

(The author is the Director HR and Lead Director, Diversified Business Group at the Murugappa Group.)

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