Tag Archive for: talent

Is Your Leadership Pipeline a Myth? How to Fix It

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High-Potential Employees Don’t Become Great Leaders All on Their Own

Many organizations believe they have a leadership pipeline. They don’t. What they actually have is a group of highly skilled people with no clear path to leadership readiness. These future executives aren’t being coached, challenged, or given real authority. And then we’re shocked when, three years later, they jump ship for a company that will actually develop them.

Provocative Point: A “leadership pipeline” that consists of hope and good intentions isn’t a pipeline—it’s wishful thinking. If you don’t have a structured system for preparing leaders, you’re just waiting for talent to either sink or leave.

Solution: Create a proactive leadership development track that gives high-potential employees early exposure to complex decision-making, strategic thinking, and executive-level mentorship. Make 2025 the year you stop assumingtalent will grow into leadership and start actively shaping the next generation of executives.

From Plateau to Peak: How to Elevate Talent Through Coaching

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Great Leaders Aren’t Born, They’re Coached

Leadership performance gaps are costly, affecting everything from team morale to organizational outcomes. Effective coaching can bridge these gaps, creating leaders who are not only skilled but also attuned to the nuances of impactful management. Achieving lasting improvement, however, goes beyond simple check-ins or basic feedback. High-quality coaching requires a strategic approach that deeply engages leaders in their growth journey.

Start with a Comprehensive Skills and Needs Assessment

An accurate assessment is the foundation for successful coaching. It goes beyond typical feedback, requiring tools that can pinpoint specific areas for growth, from strategic thinking to interpersonal skills. By using methods like 360-degree feedback, leaders gain insights that reveal blind spots they may not otherwise recognize, while also uncovering strengths they can leverage more fully.

Why it matters: For a skills assessment to be effective, it must be carefully tailored, incorporating insights from diverse perspectives. This approach yields a comprehensive picture of each leader’s performance, allowing for a targeted focus on high-impact areas. When conducted thoroughly, these assessments form a clear roadmap for where to begin the coaching journey.

Set Clear, Measurable Goals for Coaching

The value of coaching is magnified when goals are aligned with organizational priorities and structured to be measurable. Short-term goals create momentum, while long-term objectives ensure ongoing development. Both types of goals are crucial for translating a leader’s growth into tangible results within the organization.

Why it matters: Establishing detailed metrics, like behavior-based KPIs, can transform coaching from a conversation into a results-driven initiative. Metrics serve as guideposts, helping leaders focus their efforts on specific behaviors that directly influence their team and business outcomes. Setting these types of goals requires not only an understanding of performance but also a keen awareness of each leader’s unique strengths and challenges, enabling a structured path forward.

Regularly Evaluate Progress and Adapt the Coaching Plan

Leadership coaching is a dynamic process that benefits from regular evaluations. These check-ins provide insight into how well leaders are progressing and allow for real-time adjustments to the coaching plan. By incorporating periodic feedback from the leader’s team, organizations can uncover new insights into how the leader’s development impacts their team.

Why it matters: Data-driven tools, such as behavioral analytics, offer a way to objectively track performance. These tools can reveal growth in areas that are typically hard to measure, like decision-making speed and conflict resolution skills. This continuous feedback loop enables leaders to adapt, maintaining a steady focus on growth even as they tackle the day-to-day challenges of leadership.

The bottom line: Closing the leadership performance gap is part of a strategic talent development process that requires a structured, intentional approach. By starting with a robust assessment, setting concrete goals, and regularly evaluating progress, organizations can elevate their leadership teams to new levels of effectiveness. With the right coaching foundation, leaders don’t just bridge performance gaps—they build the skills that position their teams and organizations for long-term success.

Scaling Your Organization with Leadership Development Programs

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Because Leadership Growth Leads to Business Growth

Here’s the truth: your organization can only scale as fast as your leaders can grow. Sure, you can invest in new hires, advanced systems, and outside expertise, but if you’re not developing your internal talent, you’re essentially trying to fill a leaky bucket. Leadership development isn’t just a “nice-to-have”—it’s the foundation for sustainable growth. You can’t expect your company to expand if your leaders are stuck in the same old mindset, using the same old tools.  Here are three ways to leverage leadership development to grow your business.

1. Make Leadership Development a Non-Negotiable

Leadership development isn’t something you throw in when you have “extra budget” (because, let’s be real, there’s no such thing). Make it a core part of your strategy, with concrete goals tied to your growth objectives. If leaders aren’t growing, neither is your business. This needs to be a priority, not a side project.

Move the Needle: Embed leadership development metrics directly into your performance review process for all leaders, making their growth a key indicator of their success. Tie promotions and incentives not just to results but to how actively they are developing their own leadership abilities and the abilities of those they mentor.

2. Invest in Custom Programs That Fit Your Strategy and Culture

Off-the-shelf leadership development programs can provide value.  But for greater value and effectiveness finding programs that are customized to fit your specific business strategy, culture, and leadership needs will deliver much greater impact. Partner with training providers who have a track record of tailoring their programs to reflect your organization’s unique challenges and goals. Your leadership development program should resonate deeply with your internal dynamics, giving leaders the skills they need in the context of your company’s long-term vision.

Move the Needle: Co-create a leadership development program in collaboration with external experts, but with significant input from your internal leaders. This will ensure that the program is not only aligned with the company’s strategy but also incorporates real-life challenges your leaders face, creating a more immersive and impactful learning experience.

3. Track Leadership Growth Like You Track Revenue

You wouldn’t ignore your quarterly sales reports, right? So why ignore leadership development progress? Establish KPIs for leadership growth—mentoring, team performance, decision-making impact—and track them as rigorously as you would any financial metric. Scaling leaders is no different than scaling profits; you need the data to make it happen.

Move the Needle: Implement a leadership dashboard that visualizes key metrics like team engagement scores, internal promotions, leader-driven innovation, and feedback from direct reports. Make this dashboard part of your executive team’s quarterly review so leadership growth is tracked as closely as financial results, driving accountability and continuous improvement.

 

The bottom line? Scaling your organization isn’t just about expanding your customer base or boosting revenue. It’s about developing leaders who can grow alongside the business and meet the demands of an evolving market. With the right leadership development program—customized to your needs and aligned with your strategy—you’ll be equipped to scale your organization from the inside out.

Building Resilience in Organizational Structures

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Because Fighting Fires Isn’t a Sustainable Strategy

 

Let’s face it: crises are no longer the exception—they’re the rule. As a matter of fact, we should stop treating them like crises. Whether it’s market disruptions, supply chain issues, or your top talent walking out the door, the ability to bounce back is what separates the winners from the also-rans. But here’s the kicker: you can’t build resilience by waiting for disruption to strike. You need to bake it into your organization from the start.

So, how do you create resilient teams and processes that won’t buckle at the first sign of trouble? Hint: It’s not about having a Plan B—it’s about designing your entire structure to pivot on a dime. Think about redundancy, flexibility, and decision-making.

Build redundancy into your teams

No, this doesn’t mean stockpiling talent like canned goods for a rainy day. It’s about cross-training your people so when one person’s out, another can step in without missing a beat. A resilient team doesn’t depend on one rock star—it’s a well-oiled machine that can keep humming, no matter what.

  • Example: Backup leadership roles– Identify and train high potential talent who can step up during a crisis. At a minimum, the head of departments or functions that are strategically critical  should have a designated “second-in-command” who’s familiar with the strategic vision and decision-making process and can step in when needed. There’s a secondary benefit to this, too. The second in command becomes succession ready.
  • Example: Skill-sharing initiatives– Create an internal skill-sharing program where team members regularly teach each other their core responsibilities. This ensures knowledge transfer and reduces the impact of key person dependency.

Design processes that flex, not snap

Rigid processes work until they don’t. Disruption hits, and suddenly, the entire workflow comes to a screeching halt. Instead, create processes that allow for flexibility—ones that can be scaled up, down, or sideways based on real-time needs. Think of your processes like bamboo: strong but bendy.

  • Example: Scalable project management– Adopt agile project management methods, such as sprints or Kanban boards, that allow teams to quickly pivot priorities or reallocate resources as needed without losing momentum.
  • Example: Adaptive resource allocation– Implement a flexible resource allocation system that allows teams to shift budget, personnel, or time toward high-priority projects during times of crisis, without waiting for formal approval cycles. Small organizations do this out of necessity. For example, one of my clients has significant events they need to deliver for during a couple of months each year. They can’t add staff for these events and they are important to their client relationships.  Flexible resourcing allows them to bring all hands-on deck during that cycle while still serving other client needs.
  • Example: Modular workflows– Develop modular workflows that can be quickly adjusted or restructured based on changing conditions, ensuring that only the affected parts of a process need to be altered, rather than the entire system.

Build decision-making power at every level

If your team has to run every decision up the flagpole during a crisis, you’re already toast. Resilient organizations empower employees at all levels to make decisions quickly. Trust your people to act in the best interests of the company—after all, you hired them for a reason, right?

  • Example: Decentralized decision-making– Roll out a decision-rights matrix that clearly outlines what decisions can be made at each level, especially in high-pressure situations. Differentiate the decisions to be made – strategic big bet decisions that are infrequent and significant, cross-functional decisions, and high frequency/low risk decisions that can be delegated. Push down decisions as far as possible while weighing risk and frequency.  This reduces bottlenecks and encourages quicker, more informed decisions.
  • Example: Crisis-response training– Hold scenario-based training sessions where leaders and their teams are tasked with making rapid decisions during simulated disruption.  Provide feedback and make it a fun competition. This builds confidence in decentralized decision-making and improves response times.

Resilience isn’t just about survival. It’s about thriving when everyone else is scrambling. And if you’re not building it into your organizational structure now, well, good luck “winging it” the next time the market goes sideways.

The Leadership Skills Gap: What’s Missing and How to Fill It

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Future-Proof Your Leadership 

Let’s be real: the leadership skills that got us through the last decade aren’t going to cut it for the next one. The world’s changing too fast, and many of today’s leaders are under-equipped for what’s coming. It’s not just about technical prowess or emotional intelligence—it’s about adapting to a rapidly evolving landscape where leaders need to continuously stretch and grow. So, what’s missing? Let’s dig into the real gaps in leadership and how to fill them.

Gap 1: Adaptive Thinking

The pace of change means leaders can no longer afford to cling to what worked last year (or last week, for that matter). We need leaders who are not just reactive, but proactive—who can anticipate change and pivot before it hits them like a freight train. Adaptive thinking is the ability to solve complex, unpredictable problems on the fly, and it’s one of the most crucial gaps in today’s leadership ranks. Adaptive challenges can’t be solved because you have a particular set of experiences.  Continual learning is key.

How to fill it: Encourage leaders to seek out diverse perspectives regularly—across departments, industries, and markets. Introduce scenario-based planning exercises that require leaders to think several moves ahead, preparing them to react swiftly when the unexpected happens.

Gap 2: Digital Literacy

Yes, your leadership team can probably send an email and hop on a Zoom call, but can they leverage AI to drive decision-making? Do they understand how data analytics can shape strategy? The digital transformation is here, and the leaders who can’t speak the language are going to be left behind. Time to get them up to speed—fast.

How to fill it: Invest in digital upskilling programs for your leaders, whether it’s through external courses or internal workshops. Challenge them to lead data-driven decision-making in their teams by introducing KPIs that are directly tied to digital tools and technologies.

Gap 3: Developing for Growth

Too many leaders are focused on maintaining the status quo or hitting short-term goals, forgetting that leadership is about building for the future. Leaders must not only be good at growing their teams but also at growing themselves. A big gap today is the lack of focus on self-development and mentoring the next generation of leaders.

How to fill it: Role model development for yourself. Let others know how you are continuing to grow and evolve. Implement leadership development plans that include both personal growth and succession planning. Encourage leaders to mentor emerging talent, not just delegate tasks. Track their efforts in developing future leaders as part of their performance metrics.

Gap 4: Real Connection

Building trust and creating a sense of purpose among teams is no longer just a “nice to have.” It’s essential. Leaders today often struggle with truly connecting with their teams in a meaningful way. This is about more than having an “open door policy”; it’s about creating an environment where people feel heard, valued, and inspired by a shared mission.

How to fill it: Train leaders in active listening and emotional intelligence, but go a step further by ensuring they consistently align team objectives with the organization’s broader purpose. Intentionally develop an environment characterized by psychological safety.  Encourage regular one-on-one conversations where leaders focus on understanding their team members’ motivations and personal goals. Building trust is a long game—leaders need to earn it through genuine, consistent engagement.

Gap 5: Performance

It’s easy for leaders to focus on holding their teams accountable, but what about themselves? True leadership isn’t just about managing performance—it’s about creating a culture of mutual accountability where leaders and their teams are aligned on expectations, goals, and progress. A shift in how we lead is holding ourselves accountable to the very people we manage.

How to fill it: Establish regular feedback loops where leaders actively seek input from their teams on their own performance. Encourage leaders to set clear, measurable goals that they are publicly committed to within the team. Create a culture where performance discussions are transparent, and leaders model accountability by owning both successes and areas for improvement.

 

Today’s leadership landscape demands much more than traditional skill sets. Leaders need to think fast, stay digitally savvy, focus on long-term growth, build real connections, and foster a performance-driven culture. By addressing these gaps head-on, we can develop leaders who are not only equipped to navigate change but to thrive in it.

Does Your Business Discourage Dissent?

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Diversity of experience and ideas, like other types of diversity, are critical to the success of your business. Even with a deep connection to your mission and strong leadership, an insular approach to strategy and decision-making can leave you vulnerable. It can hinder your ability to see early warning signals in the market or changes in customer profiles, and it becomes too easy to believe that past success will almost guarantee future success.
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In her recently published article from Harvard Business Review, Edith Onderick-Harvey provides some practical insights into how to ensure your organization stays resilient. The article was written for the family business audience, but the challenges and solutions are applicable to virtually all organizations.
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By Edith Onderick-Harvey

Transform from the Start

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TransformationAs you know, I work with clients who are going through some type of transformation — changing their business strategy, operating model, organization structure, etc. Whatever the change, you have to start at the beginning. Sounds obvious, right? The first most critical step of any change is having a compelling, clear vision. That’s not the beginning I’m talking about today. The beginning that I’m talking about is the beginning of the talent life cycle — how you are hiring. Hiring for the future needs to be a well thought out and executed part of transformation.

In my experience, purposeful hiring is one of the most neglected business processes in many organizations. There is usually a process for posting resumes and identifying candidates. After that, it becomes haphazard. A few people meet the candidate. The hiring manager and HR (if it is involved) get some feedback. Someone is hired and you hope it works out.

Powerful, purposeful hiring processes include:

  • Identifying the critical success factors for the role — focusing on the future without neglecting the now
  • Putting together a team that can effectively assess the candidate against those success factors
  • Purposefully focusing each interview
  • Determining which questions will help you assess the candidate against the success factors. These include not just technical or professional skills but also cultural fit.
  • Debriefing the results of the interviews in a structured way.
  • Having a decision process that will allow you to rapidly move ahead.

 

 

About Edith Onderick-Harvey

Edith Onderick-Harvey is a highly regarded consultant, leadership and talent expert, and speaker. Edith is frequently quoted in the media including The New York Times, CNN.com, HR Executive, and American Executive. As the President of Factor In Talent, Edith works with leaders to take performance — their own, their team’s and their organization’s — to the next level.

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Looking to Hire? Make the Sale.

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top talentI was asked recently about how to put your company’s best foot forward when hiring in a competitive market. The first thing to think about is why someone would want to work for you.

Recruiting and hiring is a sales process. We usually think that it’s the candidate doing the selling. You and your company need to be selling, too. The best candidates have options so you have to show them why your opportunity is a great one. Show your candidates the WIIFM — what’s in it for me.

Position yourself as a top choice by having the answers to these frequent questions from top performers. They may not always ask them but they are thinking about them.

  • Why would someone want to work here? If you can’t answer this question, how can your possibly attract great people?
  • What’s different about your organization versus where the person is now? How does this opportunity give him more of what he’s looking for and less of what he doesn’t want?
  • What is the culture like and how is it unique? Top performers want to be part of something special. What’s special about your culture?
  • Who works here? People want to work with people they like and respect. Strong performers want to work with other strong performers.
  • What’s it like to work for you? Do you involve people in interesting work? Do you coach and provide feedback? Do you provide development opportunities? Do you help increase people’s visibility in the organization?
  • What will my day look like at work? This is where realism is key.
  • What might my career look like? Is this job the end of the road or are there opportunities to grow with and within the organization?

30 Minutes That Will Change the Way You Hire

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30 Minutes That Will Change the Way You Hire

We’ve all made bad hires. There was the candidate who sounded so good in the interview who we very quickly discovered was completely unqualified for the job. There was the person who had great technical expertise who brought chaos to the group because they were impossible to work with.

As I’ve worked with leaders and companies over the past several years to help them hire the best talent, one common problem I see is how little time hiring managers spend defining what skills and competencies a candidate needs to have to be successful in the job they are being hired to do. Sure, many will have a job description but the job description defines the activities of the job, not what it takes to be successful.
By spending 30 minutes defining the success factors for the job, you will greatly increase the likelihood of finding the right candidate. There are three components you need to define:

Goals/Outcomes: Where is the business going? What goals does your group need to meet in the next year or two? What goals or outcomes will the individual be expected to achieve within the first 12 – 18 months of being hired? Write these down. They form the foundation for the next two components.

Technical/Professional Skills and Experience: These are usually the easiest success factors to define. They are what the person does in the job (e.g., write press releases, manage projects, develop software,) What technical/professional skills does someone need to be successful in this role? What educational or work experiences should they have that will demonstrate the development or use of these skills?

Competencies: These success factors are often what differentiates someone who can do the job from someone who will be successful in the job. Competencies are how the individual goes about doing their work (i.e., influencing others, collaborating, handling conflict effectively, creating positive change). They are also the success factors that usually go undefined before we start interviewing . It’s the lack of these success factors that often causes someone to become a ‘problem employee’. One way to identify these success factors is to think about a team member who is very successful in a similar role. How do they go about doing their work that makes them successful?

This entire exercise should take about 30 minutes to complete. It will save you significant time, money and resources that you may have otherwise spent on candidates who are a poor fit or, worse, on employees who become a problem instead of the solution.

Five Reasons Why Good Leaders Fail

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Why Good Leaders Fail

 

Jessica had been on the high potential list every year since she started with her biotechnology company.  She was moved into a variety of roles, taking on different responsibilities and succeeding each time. She was known as a strong leader because of her ability to get results. When she moved into the Director of Operations role things began to change. Within 6 months of taking the role she wasn’t delivering the results everyone thought she was capable of delivering.  Her team was contentious and morale was wavering.  What was going on?  Had Jessica topped out her potential, a living example of the Peter Principle?  Had she lost her ability to lead?

Of course she didn’t lose her ability to lead.  Her abilities and skills had not just simply vanished but other parts of the situation had changed.

I’ve seen five common reasons why a leader who has been effective in the past is now failing.

1. Some critical skills were overlooked before. Let’s talk about the obvious reason first.  Some leaders have not developed key skills that they need to be successful.  Just like brilliant students who breeze through school, sometimes people climb to positions of leadership because they are brilliant marketers, brilliant scientists, or brilliant (put your profession here). But along the road to success, the people around this leader choose to overlook a key skill (or two or three) until it can’t be overlooked any more and causes huge issues.  For example, if we go back to Jessica, throughout her career it was noted in talent reviews that she could be abrasive and often got things done through force of will rather than by building relationships and coalitions.  She thought of herself as ‘results-focused.’  When she moved into her Operations role, it became imperative for her to build relationship with peers in other parts of the organization to get results.  Interestingly, her ‘results-focus’ is what got in the way.

2. Cultural mismatch. This is a common reason why leaders who have been wildly successful in one environment for a long time, fail miserably in a very short time in another.  The way a person operates and becomes successful in one culture can be very different from another.  For example, a leader may have been very successful in a culture that a valued quick decision making and risk taking.  Put that same leader in an environment driven by consensus and a desire to explore issues from every angle before moving forward and wait for the results.

3. Process and system mismatch. In the 1800’s, some people did very well in the wild, wild west and others went back home to the security of their established communities.  Some leaders are very adept at working in environments with less defined processes and systems.  They either work without them or really enjoy putting them in place.  Others thrive in environments where processes and systems are clearly defined.  Think of the serial entrepreneur who is put into a large, complex organization that has acquired his firm.  Change was a way of life in his entrepreneurial firm but isn’t in this large organization.  Leading change in the former was easy; everyone thrived on it.  In the new organization it takes real work. The processes that exist are meant to maintain the status quo not change it and people in his new organization wonder why he was once perceived as someone who drove change.

4. Lack of management support. Even the most seasoned executive needs people in her corner.  She needs people who support her success.  She may need coaching and mentoring to navigate the new role.  Even the best CEO won’t succeed if the Chairman of the Board decides she is not the person for the job and needs to go.

5. Organization structure. We all have been in situations where roles aren’t clear, responsibilities are redundant, unnecessary internal competition is the norm, resources aren’t available or decision making is lost in layers of management morass.  Leaders can find themselves in the same situations.  I worked for an organization once that routinely pitted leaders against each other by giving them the same issue to address or initiative to lead in different parts of the organization without each leader knowing about the other’s charge.  There could only be one winner in this situation so one of them automatically was going to fail.

Why have you seen leaders fail?