Companies today live under the relentless glare of metrics. Quarterly earnings releases, sales projections, quality and compliance audits, even employee surveys are used to gauge the enterprise’s health. Nevertheless, few such measures directly answer a key question that is frequently on the minds of the senior team: Do we have enough leaders, and the right leaders, to run our business both today and in the future?

Many CEOs cite the lack of qualified leadership talent as the most significant constraint on growth. This is happening as the pool of potential leaders shrinks before our eyes; the number of 35-to 44-year-olds in the work force, the so-called “key leader age,” will drop by 15% over the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thus the pressure on company decision makers to rethink their leadership development strategies is greater than ever.

Human resources executives and corporate leaders across the globe find that it’s simply not enough to put a leadership-training program in place or hold an annual talent review. Instead, companies must be rigorous and focused in their assessment of leadership talent, aided by tools tailored to help achieve that end. They must hold leaders accountable for cultivating others, diagnosing gaps in execution and capability, and redirecting resources as business needs change. HR and business leaders also need insights into where they have succeeded in building leadership and critical talent pipelines and where there are potential risks. In short, companies need to bring a “measurement mind-set” to the often inexact process of developing the next generation of leaders.

Because such a process, though vital, is not easy, companies often overrate their ability to measure the right things for the right reasons. For example, many generate piles of reports on senior management attrition instead of considering the actual flight risks of their critical talent; or they measure easy-to-track metrics, such as time to fill jobs or number of training hours, without regard to the quality of those... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

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