Starting a new people initiative takes preparation. Planning to launch a leadership development program quickly and successfully can seem overwhelming. How do you know where to start?
7 Steps to Launch a Leadership Development Program
At Verb, we’ve helped companies big and small get their leadership development programs launched in only a few weeks. The tips below will help you get ready to make the launch process as smooth as possible.
1. Identify Key Stakeholders & Internal Champions
Whether people operations is a team of one or a large department, knowing who’s responsible for what needs to be your priority.
If you’re taking on the task of implementing your company’s leadership development strategy entirely on your own, find stakeholders and internal champions to work with you. Even if you’re part of an enterprise-level organization, it’s important to identify champions across the organization that you can incorporate into the process.
Why is it better to have more than one person leading the charge?
First, it eliminates any bottlenecks. You’re busy, and being able to divide and conquer decisions and administrative duties cuts down on long stretches of time where things aren’t moving.
Second, major organizational changes with only one champion are less likely to succeed. Buy-in, support, and involvement from executive leadership are major factors in your strategy’s success.
Be sure to identify two or three key stakeholders and internal champions that will be involved in getting your leadership development program off the ground.
2. Get Your Tech Squared Away
Getting the technology piece in place for any project can be a significant holdup. Involve your technology team immediately and find the solutions that make the most sense for your organization.
Do you already have some sort of LMS that you’d like your leadership development program to integrate with? How would you like the connection to be made? Would a permalink do or should it be more involved?
Do you already have a password management tool where keeping track of another login wouldn’t be an issue? Or would something like single sign on (SSO) eliminate friction?
Having the answers to these sorts of questions allows integrations to be started right away. This is important since they can often take at least three weeks to complete if your existing system is completely custom.
3. Identify Your Learner Audiences
Skills development training is easier to segment. It’s clear that the sales team would be the audience for a sales training workshop. But who should be the audience for your leadership development program?
For a much larger organization, you might lean towards only onboarding people-managers initially. But at a smaller, high-growth company, having everyone participate would help everyone embody your company’s core values while leveling up first-time managers, and retaining top talent by investing in their development.
Whether you launch company-wide or prefer to segment out select groups, knowing your learner audiences from the get-go is crucial to setting goals and selecting content.
4. Clarify the Goals of Your Leadership Development Strategy
What does each learner group need most, and what impact will development have on the organization?
Since leadership development can improve engagement, increase retention, build a more diverse and inclusive workplace, and increase revenue, it can be easy to want to target everything right away. But organizational change takes time, so clarifying your initial goals will help to concentrate the initial impact.
5. Know Which Leadership Content is a Priority
Once you’re clear on your company’s learner audiences and the goals, you’ll have an idea of what content they need.
Typically, you have to manually select content from various topics in order to build a unique curriculum for your organization. However, the Verb platform simplifies this process. You can select collections or even complete pathways designed by adult learning and leadership experts that align with your audiences and their goals.
In both scenarios, knowing what type of content is right for each audience will keep you on track to launch a leadership development program in just a few weeks.
6. Set Expectations Around Usage
Workshops and seminars are simple. A calendar invite goes out, people show up and listen, and then the event is over.
An ongoing leadership development strategy can be more complicated. Should learners be engaging with content every day for a few minutes? Or should they go in once a week for a bit longer?
At Verb, our practice-based learning approach focuses on giving learners the ability to gain knowledge about a concept, practice and make a plan, apply their knowledge in the real world, and then reflect on how it went and what they’ve learned.
Have conversations with your people-managers. Make sure they make time for themselves and their teams to actively learn and practice the skills that will lead to real behavior change.
7. Build & Keep Up the Excitement Around Leadership Development
Adapting to change isn’t easy, and if you’re not sharing much about your leadership development strategy, resistance may be the default. Make time to build awareness and excitement by letting everyone in the organization know just how they’ll benefit.
Have an idea of how you’d like to continue to engage learners in the months and years ahead, as well as how leadership development will align with events, company-wide initiatives, and performance reviews.
Remember, you don’t need to be the one to manage everything. Utilize your internal champions to facilitate discussions with learners, send out occasional emails to keep people engaged, and find other simple ways to incorporate your learning development strategy into your company’s culture.
Start with Verb’s Leadership Development Platform in Just 4 Weeks
The seven steps above are ways to prepare for launching your learning development program. But you’re going to need support.
At Verb, our implementation managers are your resource while making your company’s leadership development strategy come to life. They’ll work to deeply understand your goals, audiences, and provide platform training for admins. You’ll receive communication templates to drive awareness and excitement about the leadership development program. Then after launching with your learners, Verb’s implementation managers will work to ensure your company is getting value from Verb and your learners are confident using the platform. you to ensure adoption and value.
A leadership development program can make a huge impact on your entire organization, but it doesn’t have to be a process that takes months or years to get started — it’s possible in just four weeks.