Why Leadership Development Programs Must Teach Networking

During Newberry Solutions’ webinar this month, Yana Melnikova at PepsiCo and I talked about the importance of opening up leadership development to more people, beyond high potentials and high performers. 

But it’s not just about who you include; it’s also about the foundational leadership skills that you help them learn. This raises a vital question: To transform potential into performance, what skills should your leadership development program teach?

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This question was top of mind for us as we developed our New Lens® learning platform. Based on years of experience working with top companies, we identified the biggest levers of high performance. In other words, these are the skills that we have consistently seen have the biggest impact on business results and increasing employee readiness for roles at the next level. One of those skills that often gets discussed but not ineffectively integrated into leadership development programs is building a powerful network.

Results and Relationships 

Too many people put networking on the back burner or think of it as something to squeeze in outside of their “real work.” In fact, I would wager that there are employees at your organization who are talented and hardworking, but who are not considered future leaders because they keep their heads down and believe their work should speak for itself.

Of course, results are important. But leadership isn’t just about individual competencies; it’s also the ability to get things done with and through others. Especially as an employee moves up the leadership ranks, their effectiveness depends on their relationships — with their direct reports, with their boss, with higher-level leaders, with their peers and with colleagues in other departments. That’s why a great leadership development program must set the stage for relationship building.

Ways to Encourage Networking

So how can a leadership development program help your employees build a network that will help them both drive results and advance their careers? Here are a few ideas:

• Teach networking strategies. Many people mistakenly believe that only extroverts can be good at networking. The reality, though, is that anyone can learn best practices that can help them get better at building relationships. For example, I always show my coaching clients how to identify the most critical relationships to success in their role, specific business goals or projects.

• Incorporate mentorship and sponsorship. Mentors can serve as role models for leadership development program participants, providing advice and perspective to help them develop their skills and navigate challenging situations. Sponsors, on the other hand, have clout and yield considerable influence on key decision-makers. Sponsors also give program participants critical exposure to opportunities and visibility to other influential leaders, and advocate on their behalf. While employees can establish these relationships on their own, mentorships and sponsorships are more effective when they’re part of a formal program.

• Utilize collaborative learning. One of the most overlooked but most impactful relationships are peer-to-peer. Integrate collaborative learning to foster employees sharing their knowledge and expertise, help each other navigate through challenging situations, and increase self-awareness.  Combining collaborative learning with high-quality content can even further accelerate results. We’ve already seen the power of this with New Lens, which takes the power of bite-sized lessons on foundational leadership skills and then enables deeper discussion and learning with a cohort. Not only does this accelerate learning; it strengthens workplace relationships that have become harder to build or maintain in this world of hybrid work.

How is your organization helping employees build the relationships they need for success? If you would like to learn more about how New Lens can help build networking skills (or critical leadership skills necessary for every level), check out a preview of sample content and schedule a demo.

Webinar Recap: The 5 Barriers to Leadership Development (& How to Overcome Them)

What a great webinar we had this week! Big thanks to our guest, Yana Melnikova of PepsiCo, and to all of you who attended and asked such thoughtful questions. If you watched the webinar, you know that we shared a lot of valuable, actionable insights about leadership development. This article captures the highlights, so you can keep it handy as a reference. And make sure you don’t miss our next webinar for senior HR leaders – secure your spot here. 

Leadership ‘Bench Strength’ Is Suffering

The topic of this webinar was “The 5 Barriers to Leadership Development (And What Companies Can Do About Them).” Before discussing those barriers, though, we set the stage by talking about how confident companies are in their leaders and future leaders. According to DDI’s Global Leadership Trends Report 2023:

● Only 12% of companies report confidence in the strength of their bench.

● Compared to companies with weak benches, companies that report strong benches are:

o   10 times more likely to have employees rate their leader quality as “very good” or “excellent.”

o   6 times more likely to be capable of engaging and retaining top talent.

o   5 times more likely to be able to prevent employee burnout.

o   3 times more likely to be among financially top-performing organizations.

Clearly, many companies need to build their leadership bench strength. We believe this is because of those “5 Barriers” in our webinar title. So what are those barriers? And how can we address them?

Barrier 1: Unclear or Inconsistent Strategy

I don’t have to tell you that there’s been a lot going on in the world and in the business environment over the past few years. Amid all of this, HR departments have had to pivot again and again. As a result, many organizations have been left with unclear or inconsistent leadership development strategies, and they haven’t had the bandwidth to take a step back and re-evaluate them.

As someone who is transforming talent management and organizational development globally at PepsiCo, Yana was the perfect discussion partner for this topic. She shared insights into the key components of a successful leadership development strategy. One of the most important is taking a holistic approach that gives employees “meaningful, critical experiences to practice and master their leadership capabilities.

Yana put it like this: “Everybody knows that 70% of development happens on the job. At the same time, this is where the majority of companies fail the most.”

She also stressed that any leadership development strategy should include clear expectations: “The simpler, the better.” Employees should be able to quickly understand what’s expected from them, but they should also be inspired by your leadership development framework. Yana and I both believe that leadership development should be thoroughly integrated into employees’ work, not something extra added on top. 

Barrier 2: The Audience Is Too Narrow

Everyone who is involved in leadership development at their organization should read the HBR article “Leadership Training Shouldn’t Just Be for Top Performers.” This article defines the “leadership development paradox”: Organizations keep investing in development for the employees who need it the least. High performers and high-potentials get opportunities, but others miss out.

Over time, the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” in leadership development keeps getting wider. This is a big problem because, according to DDI, the greatest source of untapped leadership potential is at the lowest levels of an organization. However, leaders may not recognize potential if it doesn’t align with what leadership has traditionally looked like where they work.

The leadership development paradox is one of the biggest reasons Newberry Solutions developed our New Lens® learning platform. Access to leadership development depends on budgets, so we wanted to create a solution that is affordable and scalable. Yana shared that PepsiCo addresses this issue by having a “wide variety of leadership development programs that will address different cohorts or different target audiences.”

Barrier 3: Training vs. Development

These two things are not the same. True leadership development enables employees to use new insights and tools to keep growing their skills and contribute in a different way within the organization.

I recommend that organizations look closely at any leadership development program they are considering to make sure the content is relevant to employees. I would also caution companies about getting lured by whatever is “shiny and new” in leadership development instead of reinforcing through application what employees have already learned. In New Lens, we leverage “micro-learning” so that employees can make development an effortless part of their day.

Another factor that drives long-term development is collective learning. Is your organization driving connections between employees that help them share knowledge? PepsiCo even works to build relationships on the global level, Yana shared.

Barrier 4: Focusing on the Wrong Narrative

In your organization, does the discussion of leadership development revolve mostly around the cost or the benefits? The framing really makes a difference in how effective any leadership development program is.

“The more you involve current leaders and executives in the leadership development, the more they will see the value and the impact,” Yana said. And I agree! Leaders need to see the connection between the investment in leadership development and the results that investment delivers. Yes, having these conversations takes time when everyone is busy. But they’re so important to your organization’s long-term health.

Barrier 5: Underutilizing Technology

Technology continues to evolve at a dizzying pace, giving us access to more and more data. Leadership development programs should take advantage of these advances. For example, how are you measuring the impact of development programs?

As I touched on earlier, technology also enables us to make leadership development available to more people — anytime, anywhere. And it empowers us to deliver customized development experiences at scale. For the first time, having a leadership development program tailored to your unique needs does not necessarily involve working one one-on-one with a coach. With New Lens, each user gets their own unique development plan.

Based on her experiences, Yana sees great potential for technology, including AI, to take us to the next level of leadership development.

Next Steps for HR Leaders

Thanks again to everyone who made our event this week a success. I’m already looking forward to our next webinar. It’s scheduled for 9 a.m. CDT on Friday, June 7, so save a spot on your calendar and stay tuned here for more details. In the meantime, I invite you to check out our New Lens platform and how it has helped other companies. You can explore sample content here.

Stay in the conversation by joining our next webinar for senior HR leaders – register here to make sure you don’t miss out.

Questions about how to strengthen your company’s leadership development pipeline? Let’s talk.

Are You Developing Enough Leaders?

One of the biggest things we’ve learned from the pandemic and the other challenges of the past few years, is that we all need to lead today. Leadership skills are critical at every level. But, in too many organizations, leadership development programs are still reserved primarily for employees already identified as “HiPo’s” – high-potential and high-performing employees. In other words, the employees who receive the most leadership development are the very ones who need it the least because there performance is already strong. In an influential article for Harvard Business Review, professors Navio Kwok and Winny Shen call this phenomenon “the leadership development paradox.” In the long-term, this approach affects the quality, diversity, and size of an organization’s pipeline of leaders. But we can address it by providing leadership training opportunities to a wider array of employees.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

How Strong Is Your Leadership Pipeline?

When a company decides whether to invest in leadership development for an employee, they directly shape that employee’s career path. Employees who receive leadership development are more likely to be promoted to senior level, high-exposure roles. Meanwhile, employees outside of that high-potential group are more likely to stay at their current performance level or even get worse — because they’re getting less access to the leadership development programs that could help them improve as well as opportunities for career advancement.                       

When only a select group of employees gets greater access to leadership development, organizations miss out on what others could potentially contribute. Although budget is a key consideration, can we afford to do this? Even small improvements across a broader population can have a big impact on overall company performance and cultivate a sustainable culture of growth and innovation.

According to DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2023, CEOs are already worried about how to develop the next generation of leaders — and only 12% of companies are confident that they have a strong bench of leaders who are prepared to step into key roles.

As a firm with a niche focused on developing women leaders, we’re also concerned about how the leadership development paradox may disproportionately affect women. Ambition has increased, as shown in the McKinsey/LeanIn.org Women in the Workplace 2023 report, which  found that eight out of 10 women want to get promoted. The numbers are even higher for women younger than 30 and women of color (93% and 88%, respectively).

However, the report also found that women are still under-represented at every level of leadership. They’re less likely to get that first promotion to manager than men are. (And the gap is even bigger for women of color.) With fewer women than men rising through the ranks, it only makes sense that fewer women reach the highest levels of leadership.

How to Develop More Leaders

To fix the leadership pipeline, we must offer leadership development more broadly — but in a way that satisfies each individual’s needs while addressing tight schedules and company budgets. 

We embedded those principles into our New Lens® learning platform, added the same expertise we’ve used to help 75% of our clients get promoted, and packaged it all into bite-sized lessons and collaborative learning that employees can easily fit into their days.

Beyond considering something like New Lens, use these strategies to strengthen your leadership pipeline:

• Rethink how you identify potential leaders. DDI recommends using digital assessments to identify hidden talent.  They explain that “leaders may not recognize potential if it doesn’t align with what leadership has traditionally looked like in the organization,” adding that in remote or hybrid environments, some leadership skills may be overlooked.

• Tap into your internal expertise. How are you making the most of the vast knowledge your people can share with each other? Mentorship and sponsorship are surprisingly underused tools for cultivating future leaders. Also look for opportunities to use peer-to-peer cross-training to build relationships and leadership skills.

• Make key experiences more accessible. It’s common for organizations to have roles that are seen as a springboard to higher leadership positions. Is your organization inadvertently funneling only certain groups to these jobs? For example, are women pushed toward marketing and HR vs. operations?

Your organization can unlock limitless potential by investing in more leadership development opportunities for your employees. We live and breathe these issues with our Fortune 500 clients. So, as you consider your company’s short and long-term development needs, schedule a call with us. We would be happy to discuss how you can strengthen your pipeline of talent by unleashing more employees’ potential.

Fixing the ‘Broken Rung’ for Women at Work

You’ve probably heard of the glass ceiling for women at work. But what we really should be focusing on is the broken rung.

That’s according to the Women in the Workplace 2023 report, from McKinsey in partnership with LeanIn.org. The report debunks workplace myths about women (I wrote about its findings regarding women and ambition recently.) One of the biggest myths is that the glass ceiling is the biggest obstacle women face in reaching senior leadership. But what McKinsey and LeanIn found — and what we’ve observed firsthand here at Newberry Solutions — is that the barriers to women start far earlier in their careers.

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The broken rung discussed in the report is the fact that fewer women than men get that first key promotion to manager. That puts fewer women in the leadership pipeline, which ultimately leads to a shortage of female candidates for senior leadership positions. As the report states:

Because of the gender disparity in early promotions, men end up holding 60 percent of manager-level positions in a typical company, while women occupy 40 percent. Since men significantly outnumber women, there are fewer women to promote to director, and the number of women decreases at every subsequent level.

How big of a problem is the broken rung? McKinsey and LeanIn found that for every 100 men promoted to manager, only 87 women were. The gap is even bigger for women of color: 73 were promoted to manager for every 100 men who were. This problem is not new. The Women in the Workplace report has flagged it for nine consecutive years. But we clearly need to do more to address it. As a firm that’s passionate about helping women succeed — and that has a strong track record of helping them get promoted — this is one of our top priorities. So we want to highlight McKinsey and LeanIn’s recommendations on fixing the broken rung — and add some of our own.

How to Help Women Get Promoted

• Realize that the problem is not with women and their ambition. Some leaders may brush off the broken rung by claiming that women don’t want promotions and are more likely to step away from work. But that’s outdated — and inaccurate — thinking. The Women in the Workplace report shows that women are actually more ambitious now than they were before the Covid-19 pandemic. (We’ve seen the same thing in our work with high-performing women.) Roughly equal numbers of women and men want promotions. That’s even true for women who work remotely or on a hybrid schedule.

• Address performance bias. All too often, women are hired or promoted based on what they’ve done, while men are hired or promoted based on potential. In their report, McKinsey and LeanIn recommend taking “de-biasing” steps. For example, require that managers give their rationale behind performance evaluations and recommendations for promotions.

• Make development more equitable. Do the current learning and development programs at your organization include enough women who have the potential to be promoted? And does the content of those programs focus on what women need to get promoted? For some inspiration, check out our case study “Empowering Women to Reach Their Leadership Potential.” It tells the story of how a Fortune 50 company used our New Lens® learning platform to prepare more women for promotions.

Research is clear that companies benefit from having women in senior leadership roles. But to accomplish this goal, you have to take action much earlier in the leadership pipeline. This is one of the reasons we created New Lens, and we’re excited that it’s becoming part of the solution for the broken-rung problem. To learn more and set up a demonstration, visit newlensleadership.com.

The Truth About Women and Ambition

True or false? During the Covid-19 pandemic, women have become less ambitious than men are.

False. Very false.

But if you answered “true,” I can understand why. Perhaps you’ve seen news articles about the “lazy girl jobs” trend or women leaving the workforce.

Photo by Jopwell

Those headlines, however, tell only part of the story. The Women in the Workplace 2023 report, from McKinsey in partnership with LeanIn.org, fills in some gaps in the narrative. This report debunks myths about women at work, including the one that they lack ambition.

Because we’re a firm with a special passion for developing women leaders, the Women in the Workplace report is always required reading for us. We believe it should be for your organization as well. Over the next few weeks, we’ll take a closer look at the report’s findings, compare them with what we see firsthand through our work, and share recommendations on cultivating women leaders in your organization. And we’ll start with the myth of women’s declining ambitions.

8 Out of 10 Women Want Promotions

The pandemic was an enormous blow to women at work. More women than men lost their jobs, and women experienced more stress and burnout than men did. But the Women in the Workplace report found that women are actually more ambitious now than they were before the pandemic. In 2019, about 70% of women wanted to get promoted to the next level. Today, that figure is 81% — identical to the percentage of men who want to get promoted. Younger women and women of color are even more ambitious. Among women under thirty, 93% are aiming for a promotion, while 88% of women of color are.

The report also refutes the perception that women who work remotely or on a hybrid schedule are less ambitious. In fact, they’re a little more likely to want promotions than women who work fully on-site. Furthermore, across all types of work schedules (remote, hybrid, on-site), women are just as likely to want a promotion as men in comparable arrangements.

What We’re Hearing from Women

The Women in the Workplace report’s findings on ambition track closely with what we’ve observed firsthand. Our work frequently involves helping top organizations cultivate women leaders. (For some examples, check out our case studies on how companies are using our New Lens® app to invest in women’s development.) We’ve coached countless women and spoken at events for women (such as the D CEO Emerging Women Leadership Network Program). Beyond  Newbery Solutions, I’m also involved with nonprofits and other entities that focus on elevating women, including Texas Women’s Foundation, the Senator Jane Nelson Institute for Women's Leadership at Texas Woman’s University, the United Way Fund for Women and Children, and 50/50 Women on Boards. So I have a lot of conversations with women about what’s happening in their careers and in their workplaces.

And what I hear from them echoes what McKinsey and LeanIn.org found. Women care deeply about their work and are constantly looking for ways they can make a bigger impact. They’re excited about flexible schedules that help them manage their personal lives without shortchanging their careers. The McKinsey/Lean In statistics aren’t the only findings that demonstrate women’s ambition. Women are starting more businesses than they did before the pandemic. Women are also more likely to attend college and obtain their degrees than men are.

Build a Pipeline of Women Leaders

As we celebrate women’s growing ambitions, we must also look for ways to translate these ambitions into gains for women at the top levels of leadership. While we’ve made some progress in closing the C-suite gender gap, women still hold less than one-third of these roles

The problem, according to the Women in the Workplace report, is a broken leadership pipeline. Women are less likely to get that first promotion to manager than men are. (And the gap is even bigger for women of color.) With fewer women than men rising through the ranks, it only makes sense that fewer women reach the highest levels of leadership.

 This discrepancy ultimately hurts organizations. We see in the McKinsey/Lean In report that there are great numbers of ambitious women out there who are eager to lead. When these women don’t get promoted, their employers miss out on untold potential. 

So how can we make our workplaces more equitable and help women get the promotions they aspire to?

• Talk about the Women in the Workplace report with your team. This discussion can help surface any misconceptions about women and ambition that your employees may have.

• Make leadership development training accessible to more employees. Companies rarely have budgets to provide coaching to everyone who wants it. It’s more likely to be reserved for senior leaders. That leaves out vast numbers of high-potential employees who could benefit. This was one of our main motivations for creating New Lens.

• Implement employee resource groups (ERGs) for women and women of color. According to the McKinsey/Lean In report, 93% of companies with strong pipelines of women leaders had ERGs with content tailored for women. That’s compared with 83% for companies overall. For women of color, the difference is even more dramatic: 61% of companies with strong pipelines have targeted ERGs, compared with 44% of companies overall.

Increasing the ranks of women leaders is a big topic, and one we’ll continue to explore in upcoming articles. Got questions? Please share them with me on LinkedIn. You could help shape our future content. In the meantime, check out the full Women in the Workplace 2023 report and explore how New Lens® democratizes access to leadership development.