Will your upcoming leaders disappear?

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article yesterday, titled Leadership Training Gains Urgency Amid Stronger Economy.  They remind us of some important dynamics in leadership development:

• Existing leadership continues to age, many now getting dangerously close to retirement age.
• Leadership ranks have been downsized as the workforce has experienced the same crunch.
• Investments in leadership development have waned (or have been eliminated) due to the recent economic turmoil.

I’ve seen several analysts remind us that the retirement of baby boomers may well be the next crisis in corporate management, because the demographics haven’t changed.  And when these people have more confidence in the future value of their retirement savings, many will take the opportunity to leave you behind.

And that includes your existing leaders, because often they’re some of the more senior people in your organization.

Have a look at the pool of potential leaders in your organization:

• Are you prepared for the ripple effect that happens when you promote someone into a more senior role?  How will you back-fill the holes which are created?
• Do you have a handle on how many of those key people are inclined to leave your organization when your industry takes a more positive turn?  Will you be a net loser of key talent, or be able to attract more than you lose?
• Do those High Potentials have the skills to quickly be effective as your new leaders?  You may well lose some existing leaders faster than you’d like, due to retirement, poaching, or burnout.
• Do your future leaders have powerful reasons to stay with you?  You can only use pay and benefits to a certain point; after that you have to influence them by understanding their personal motivators.

It’s time to start investing in developing your future leaders, to scrape together some budgets which were sacrificed during recent years.  You might be worried about what happens when a lot of your key people head for the door, but what happens when a few of those people represent the future direction of your business?

It doesn’t take much to create a disaster of epic proportions when we’ve been stretched so thin.

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