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From operations to leadership: how to create a learning and organizational development strategy

14/12/2023 by Alberto Pezeiro









The lack of preparation of employees, managers, and leaders with the skills required for each position is one of the main obstacles that can prevent or delay the growth of an organization.

In the late 1990s, I was responsible for Latin America in the Training and Corporate Development department at GE, at that time the company with the highest market value in the world. My main responsibility was managing the Leadership Development Program, in collaboration with HR professionals from the different business units.

In 2004, drawing on everything I had learned during those years of experience, I created SETA: a company that is now a benchmark in corporate training and has already helped thousands of professionals and companies to achieve prominent positions and excellence in the market.

This article is the first in a series that aims to share some of these ideas about learning and organizational development, as well as analyze the fundamental role that HR and talent development professionals play in this process.
The fundamental question with which we must begin this investigation is: what criteria should be taken into account when creating and measuring the success of a training and education program?
 
Professionals who are starting their careers are primarily evaluated on their performance in operational activities and their technical knowledge.
At this stage, delivery capability is (almost) everything. You begin to develop basic routine management skills and simple improvement projects, as well as monitoring indicators and solving minor day-to-day problems.
Basic leadership fundamentals such as teamwork, self-awareness, time management, facilitation, high-performance teams, giving and receiving feedback, presentation techniques, among others, are also some of the recurring topics in the training offered to this audience.

When moving into management positions, technical knowledge remains important, but management skills and business knowledge become essential, particularly a strategic vision of the relationships between different areas of the organization. Leadership skills are also more in demand at this stage, and demonstrating them on a daily basis becomes a differentiating factor.
It is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the processes under your responsibility in order to lead people in the execution of activities and the delivery of expected results. Valuing integration between areas, incorporating the principles and values of the organization, being able to engage subordinates, and leading the necessary transformation projects are fundamental obligations of management positions.
To help develop these skills, training courses on topics such as change management and innovation, agile mindset and practices, project management, emotional intelligence, influencing and communication skills, situational leadership, and executive presence are a priority.

Once professionals reach executive positions, where a broader and deeper understanding of the organization is required, the relative importance of technical knowledge diminishes. Business and management knowledge and, above all, leadership skills become extremely important.
It is necessary to prepare professionals to understand all aspects of the products, customers, partners, competition, and technologies involved in the business, as well as the processes of raising funds and allocating capital.
The ability to look to the future in order to maintain the organization's competitiveness, define the right strategy and, above all, execute it, leading the organization's professionals in the right direction, is the main skill that must be demonstrated at this stage of professional life.
Strategic planning and goal deployment, change management in low-predictability environments, finance for non-financial professionals, corporate communication, and investor and shareholder relations are some of the main topics covered in the training courses for this stage of the professional career.

It is important to note that the model presented above is only a mental map to help HR, Organizational Development, or Talent Development professionals develop a training path that adequately prepares professionals throughout their careers.
Like any model, it does not apply to 100% of cases. There are companies, for example, where, for some roles, the importance of technical knowledge increases continuously over time. Imagine, for example, a travel company that employs thousands of programmers to improve and maintain its virtual system in constant operation. These professionals need ongoing training to develop new features and keep the organization's website and/or application up to date. In this case, management and leadership skills development programs will coexist with ongoing technical training programs.
  Over the past 30 years, whenever I have participated in a leadership development program, the implementation of a corporate university, or the creation of a leadership academy, a recurring question from clients has been: how can we calculate the return on investment for the organization?
There are a number of indicators that can be developed: number of training hours per employee, NPS (Net Promoter Score) for training, financial return on investment, among others.
However, what most closely approximates the purpose of the Organizational Development area is to measure the percentage of vacancies for managerial and executive positions that were filled by people from within the organization itself.
The better the Development Program, the greater the likelihood of employee retention and career progression, which will generate a steady stream of promotions, immediate replacement of vacant positions, and the elimination of obstacles to the company's growth due to a lack of trained professionals, whether with technical, management, or leadership skills.
At GE, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, approximately 95% of executive positions were filled by people from within the company itself.
  Having the right professionals ready at the right time to fill leadership positions is one of the main concerns of HR and Development professionals, as well as senior managers within an organization.
What should be the scope of the program? How should content be curated? Who will participate? What will be the necessary investment? What part of the training will be handled by HR, and what part will be handled by the respective client areas? These are just some of the questions that organizations around the world are asking themselves, and for which there are no easy answers. I will address some possibilities in future articles.
In general, organizations need to be consistent in their goals and seek their own path to continuous progress in the development of their professionals, always attentive to changes in the business environment and, above all, critically analyzing the benefits of investing in the training of their current and future leaders.