Why Embedding New Relational Skills Requires A New Style Of Leadership Development

How to best prepare individuals to step into a leadership role

By Amy Lavoie, Torch

Theworld is getting less predictable every day. Some things have not changed — investors expect revenue, growth, retention, engagement and productivity success on an endless upward trend. And now employers – and employees –expect more from the people who lead our organizations.

They want them to steer the boat safely through increasingly choppy waters. The skills now required for leaders – such as building remote culture, inclusive leadership, and managing ambiguity require a level of relational and interpersonal aptitude that is now table stakes for success.

At the same time, in an era of hybrid work environments and increased labor mobility, we want leaders to be responsive and supportive of each person’s unique needs for development and growth. So being a leader is a challenging function. How do we best prepare individuals to step into a leadership role and achieve all this?

Working with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, we asked 665 leaders from across several industries around the world about their experience of leadership development in the 2020s.

The study, Leveraging Coaching and Mentoring to Create More Effective Leaders, found that leadership development is changing to meet the demands of today’s workplaces in the following ways:

Leadership is becoming more personalized — the vast majority of respondents (86%) agree that personalized leadership development is required in their changing work environment.

But we are getting more skeptical about some approaches. Though leadership skills training is still the most commonly used leadership development tool (80% of respondents), it is rated as much less effective than personalized and relationshipbased options, with 35% rating skills training as “extremely” or “very effective” versus a much higher 60% for coaching.

Chief executive officers (CEOs) are also redefining essential leadership skills. New workforce and strategic imperatives have changed the leadership style organizations need. Across the board, organizations are moving from more traditional authoritative leadership styles towards a much more trust-based dynamic. For example, we see a focus on developing relational skills (previously dubbed “soft” skills), e.g., the ability to motivate and collaborate with teams.

Leadership development is also, finally, getting more inclusive. Historically, leadership development opportunities were only offered to senior executives or “high-potential” leaders selected through an opaque process. Today, 64% of respondents strongly agree that it is important to provide leadership development more broadly. In parallel, half told us they are working to increase the equity and inclusiveness of their mentoring and coaching programs.

It is also attracting more investment. All respondents in the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services’ study intend to increase their use of leadership development initiatives over the next couple of years. And the greatest planned increase is in overall leadership skills training (61%), but also personalized leadership mentoring (55%) and coaching (50%).

While these trends are observed across all respondents, the research pays special attention to the practices of leadership development standouts, which the research calls “leaders”—that is to say, the 26% of respondents who reported the strongest performance of their leadership development programs against desired results.

Compared with their peers, leaders report far more benefits from their leadership development investments. Intriguingly, and in line with the findings about focus on relational skills, the top benefit identified is better collaboration/teamwork, reported by 69% of leaders, followed by increased employee engagement (60%), better performance from teams, and greater emotional intelligence (59% each).

Reassuringly for all stakeholders, 35% of leadership development leaders report increased revenue as a direct outcome of their leadership development efforts. They are achieving this by following six powerful leadership current best practices:

1. Align Leadership Development with Business Objectives

Though two-thirds of respondents agree that their leadership development strategy is important to their overall business strategy, leaders are more likely (52%) to say that their leadership development strategy is aligned with their business strategy over their competitors

2. Customize to Their Organization’s Specific Needs

Leaders in our survey do not rely on out-of-the-box programs, but rather seek to tailor their investments to the unique culture, objectives and values of their workplace. 41% of leaders say their leadership development is very customized to their organizations, with 23% of “followers” and 13% of “laggards” saying the same

3. Invest in a Swathe of Relationship-based Initiatives

Leaders are more likely to leverage coaching and mentorship, and to cite those programs as their most effective ones. Organizations that have placed coaching and mentoring as key parts of their leadership development are especially likely to experience benefits from those programs. A significantly high 80% of those who view coaching as key strongly agree that they experience better collaboration/ teamwork, for example, and 70% of those who cite mentoring as critical agree.

4. Measure Results

We found that leading organizations are more likely to use multiple metrics when evaluating the results of their leadership development programs. They are also more likely to measure impact in the first place, and seem to be significantly more focused on outcome metrics beyond employee participation or satisfaction, such as retention and promotion rates.

5. Ensure Consistency

Forty eight percent of leaders in our research have structured organizational processes in place to make sure their programs are delivered and managed consistently, compared to 27% of followers and 15% of laggards. One way some ensure consistency is by working with a third-party organization to help design, manage and measure programs.

6. And, Strive to Always Build with an Inclusive Mindset

We saw repeatedly that leading organizations are designing inclusive leadership development strategies: they are far more likely to offer development opportunities to people across levels, use a broader range of methods to identify potential participants, integrate diversity and inclusion into their initiatives, and increase access for high-potential and underrepresented groups.

What to make of all this? We knew that organizations are facing pressures that are redefining what skills leaders need to thrive at work. What we have found is that leading organizations are facing them head-on, and indeed, leveraging them as an opportunity to rapidly customize and adapt leadership development to meet their new needs and reap business rewards.

Though strategies diverge based on context, these leading organizations are more likely to invest in relationship-based initiatives like coaching and mentoring and more likely to align their leadership development strategy to business objectives.

Leading organizations are also customizing their employee development to their organization’s direct needs. They are building programs with the end in mind-often with third-party experts to achieve consistency and measure results. And finally, they are investing with an inclusive mindset, ensuring all leaders will benefit from leadership development designed to make them – and their organizations – successful.

Amy Lavoie is VP of People

Success at the people development platform Torch. She strives to help organizations, leaders, and teams create cultures where people can bring their best selves to work and do their best work.

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