Measuring Leadership Development Series: Part 2
What can you learn?
There are two central points to learn from just about any human capital measurement study: the program’s past impact and ways to improve impact in the future. Past impact is often described as a return on investment (ROI) and is useful for justifying a program’s continued funding and deployment. The ability to make future improvements, either by replicating known successes or adjusting for past shortcomings, represents a unique competitive advantage. Scientifically-analyzed data is a virtual gold mine of information for proactive decision-making and sound investments in human capital.
Following are some questions our clients ask about their leadership development programs:
- How do we know this program is working?
- Are we targeting the right people to develop as future leaders of the organization?
- Is the program impacting retention of newly-developed leaders?
- Does current leadership contribute to the development of future leaders?
- What improvements should we make as we deploy the program in the future?
In real organizations, no program stands in isolation—other initiatives and events can affect how well programs work. Using scientific techniques that look at demographic data, prior performance, and mitigating variables, you can untangle the program’s outcomes from other forces affecting employee performance. Doing so allows you to address tough questions with quantifiable answers, such as the following:
- Are participants who complete the leadership development program more engaged than their untrained counterparts?
- Is the program impacting team-based metrics, such as safety scores or customer satisfaction?
- Is the program linked to overall business goals?
Because soft-skill development (like leadership) carries the potential for wide-ranging impact, it’s crucial to know if it’s working. Good leadership skills have the potential to affect nearly every area of the business, particularly if they are developed in the right way, with the right people. We now come back to the two key findings from any measurement study: past impact and future insight.
If you tackle measurement with a scientific approach, pulling insight from qualitative and quantitative data, you can uncover opportunities for future improvements. For example, you may link the program to Millennials netting higher satisfaction scores from their customers, while finding that it has less of an impact in the same area for Gen X-ers. You’ve identified an issue that you can act upon—you may decide to discontinue deployment to Gen X-ers and spend that budget allocation on a separate customer satisfaction intervention tailored to the X-ers. Here’s another example: perhaps the program increases retention among males, but not among their female counterparts. In order to increase retention rates among women identified as future leaders, you may consider a different approach, such as a networking group or mentoring.
Insights such as these scratch the surface of what clients have learned by measuring leadership development initiatives. Join us next month as we discuss how to get started—whether you are in the design phase of your leadership program or are in the midst of deployment. Even completed deployments can be measured and mined for insight into future investments.