3 Ways How Companies Can Build Their Leadership Pipeline

Over the past few years, taking into view the evolving trends in businesses, the nuances of what leadership constitutes have completely changed. How books of management defined leaders a decade ago has changed.

While earlier the sole purpose of a leader was to lead and motivate their team to fulfill organizational goals, this sort of “personality-driven” leadership simply wouldn’t be able to run the companies of this decade.

Leaders of today have to be equipped with all sorts of technical know-how while also being agile, strategic, welcoming, and charismatic. Finding and recruiting leaders is a challenge in today’s business environment, and company boards are actively partaking in building their leadership pipelines.

A leadership pipeline is essentially a leadership succession plan that goes into play with high-level executives who resign or are let go. Having a leadership pipeline in place ensures that directors never run out of capable executives, and given below are three ways how companies can build their leadership pipeline:

1.     By initiating mentorship and coaching programs

Mentorship and coaching programs are important components of a leadership pipeline. By engaging senior and experienced leaders in forums that involve future leaders, the former would be able to impart their knowledge, insight, and learning to the latter both formally and informally.

Instead of holding such activities in-house, companies can outsource this function to executive development experts by Maximus International. Outsourcing would allow your executives to interact with renowned industry leaders, as opposed to limiting them to in-house senior executives.

2.     By enabling cross-departmental learning

Interdepartmental rivalries, caused for whatever reason, can hamper the success of any company no matter how big or small. Hence, you must enable your executives to engage in cross-departmental learning. Not only does doing so teach things the nuances of each department – a skill they will very likely need as future CEOs – but it would also limit the chances of interdepartmental feuds to disrupt organizational goals.

Companies can enable interdepartmental learning by conducting team-building events, apprenticeships or job shadowing, and cross-departmental collaborations. Cross-departmental assignments for problem-solving can also be very beneficial in this manner.

3.     By putting them in leadership positions

The best way to learn something is by doing it, and that is what you should be doing in your leadership development program. To build future leaders, you need to treat your executives similarly, and this can be done by giving them additional responsibilities and involving them in impotent decisions.

When your executives have the burden of doing everything right the first time in time-sensitive situations, they are likely to act as a leader early on. In times of crises that require strategic urgency, involve some of the best candidates from your leadership pipeline to help them gain real-time experience in what their future could look like.

Conclusion

Building your leadership pipeline is crucial for securing the future of your company. Never in your company’s timeline should there be ambiguity in terms of who the next leader is going to be and hence top management should be putting the above-mentioned methods into play to build their leadership pipeline.