Development Centres for Leadership Development

Development Centres for Leadership Development

One of the gaps that we often see in leadership promotions and succession planning is organisations taking the time to identify the capabilities needed to lead at a particular level or in a particular environment, systematically evaluating future leaders against those capabilities, and developing the skills that are essential or lacking.

When you have a high performing employee who is technically very good at their job, it is often tempting to promote them into a position where they will be leading others doing that work. However, doing the work yourself and leading people who are doing the work are two very different jobs, which require very different skillsets and capabilities. Some people are very good at one of these, but lacking the skills or knowledge to do the other one well.

It can be challenging to understand how someone will perform when faced with the tasks and challenges involved in a leadership role, when they have never been faced with these situations previously.

While some organisations try to use interviews, written applications, performance reviews, or recommendations from other leaders to identify future leaders, these approaches are inherently limited in that they rely on data from a non-leadership role or a leadership role at a different (lower) level.

One alternative approach to identifying how someone currently measures up against the competencies for a leadership role is to actually put them through their paces in a development centre. This is a type of assessment centre that is used for development, rather than selection, approaches, whereby candidates are put through a series of job-related assessments that simulate the types of scenarios they will actually have to deal with on the job, being assessed against the competencies for that level of leadership role.

These assessments could include business analysis tasks or case studies, presentations, group problem solving activities, role plays around performance management or dealing with a difficult employee, situational and behavioural interviews, scenario simulations, and other in-tray exercises.

The advantages of putting candidates through a development centre process as part of broader succession planning or leadership development include:

• Providing job-relevant activities and a realistic job preview
• Greater confidence in identifying candidates’ strengths and development areas against key competencies for that particular leadership role
• Creating realistic development plans based on identified development areas
• Ability to provide in-depth feedback to candidates (both written and verbal)
• Providing a more fair, objective, and standardised process for identifying and promoting future leaders in the business

If you are looking for ways to enhance the development of leaders at any level in your business, development centres offer a unique opportunity to bring leadership potential to life, providing valuable insight into what future leaders can do today and what they need