Senior Leader and High-Potential Development

Building Your Senior Leadership Bench

About 60% of executives say they were not prepared for the strategic challenges they faced upon being appointed to senior leadership roles. It’s no surprise, then, that 50%– 60% of executives fail within the first 18 months of being promoted or hired.¹

Organizations need their next generation of leaders to assume greater leadership scope, responsibility, and complexity at a rate faster than their predecessors. Much will be asked of these future leaders, yet what do proven experiences look like that truly prepare high potentials to meet and exceed expectations? We can help.

MDA Leadership excels at crafting company-specific, tailored development journeys to prepare your senior leaders for future priorities and challenges in a changed business world. We advocate these best practices as they increase the ultimate impact and sustainability of high-potential programs:

• Think of high-potential development as a business imperative—Senior leadership needs to look at this as a way to engage a core group of leaders in building the organization of the future.
• Engage senior leadership—Be sure that senior leaders are engaged in and support your high-potential development efforts. Walk them through the thinking and decision-making around your program and involve senior leaders as faculty in developing high potentials.
• Create a cross-pollination of participants—Seek a diverse group of high potentials from across the organization, so that they can learn more from one another and build strong networks across the enterprise.
• Emphasize assessment—Empower participants with knowledge about their strengths and development opportunities through assessment, so they can fully leverage program content based on their own context.
• Accelerate leadership growth and capacity through coaching—An executive coach can help high potentials understand what is required to be successful at different levels of leadership, gain deep insight into their leadership impact, and translate this insight into action through growth planning.
• Include powerful action learning projects—Be sure that the action learning opportunities provided are substantive and relevant to the organization’s interests.
• Set participant expectations—Remind high potentials that the value of this work is not entirely from the action learning project and that the organization cares equally about their personal development and growth.
• Take a long view of ROI—While the action learning projects will likely provide a solid return on your investment, think of high-potential development ROI as a long-term process, spanning several years, in order to see the ultimate impact on the business.

¹Harvard Business Review, “Executives Fail to Execute Strategy Because They’re Too Internally Focused,” November 2017.