International trends in Leadership Development: Charting the popularity of development centres.
After a bit of a lull the UK business psychology industry has seen a significant increase in demand for development centres – from both UK and international clients, although interestingly for quite different reasons.
In the UK, the 2009 recession led to some significant restructuring, if not downsizing and organisations are now at the point of needing to consolidate those changes.
Typically, the restructure has led to a rationalisation of roles – particularly at management level, leading to those individuals that are left working in an expanded role and taking on responsibilities that have been historically outside of their domain.
As a result, depending on how brutal the restructure a leadership population can end up feeling a little fragile and their organisation is realising that to re-inspire them, and get them working to the required level, investment and development in this population is required. As a result businesses are turning to development centres as a first step in making this happen, typically as part of a plan for a broader leadership development programme.
Outside of the UK, for example in Turkey and the Middle East, the reason for the increase in demand is quite different. Here, organisations are expanding rapidly and for this growth to be sustainable, they are seeing as a priority the need to assess the current abilities of their management population. They want to evaluate the potential of their key players in relation to the new, shinny and bright future the company is moving towards.
In both instances the increase in demand for development centres seems to echo the findings of the CIPD Learning and Talent Development Annual Survey Report 2011.
The report found that “the most common focus for leadership development activities in the next 12 months will be enabling the achievement of the organisations’ strategic goals (43%), improving the skills of leaders to think in a more strategic and future-focused way (39%) and developing high-potential individuals valued by the organisation (37%)”.
In addition, for the third year in a row in-house development programmes and coaching by Line Managers were most commonly ranked in the top three most effective learning and development practices (by approx 50% of respondents). A third ranked on-the-job training as amongst their top three practices.
So why the increased popularity?
At the most simplistic level, if organisations want to put their people (usually managers) through a leadership development programme they need to know what to develop.
Whist the usual performance management data can give an indication of this; typically at this point the business is looking for a more in-depth, concrete, and possibly more objective data to work with. They also want to convey this to the target population, which brings me onto the second reason.
Communication. A development centre sets the tone for the leadership development programme, what it values, where and what the organisation wants its leaders to develop towards or even highlight how things will be different going forwards. Sometimes this second reason is actually more powerful than the first.
So what are the benefits?
I could spend some time waxing lyrical on this point, but luckily (for you) two very nice people from Yorkshire, Leese and Taylor (1996) carried some research on this very topic. Through factor analysis they found that the benefits of carrying out development centres could be understood in the context of three primary areas: personal development, career development, organisational commitment. Three benefits, which in these current times are pretty high on a lot of organisations’ hit lists!
When don’t they work?
Fundamentally however, regardless of any increased popularity and overarching benefits, development centres are only really effective if they are designed, implemented and followed up properly. They need to be introduced and rolled out with some real thought, good intentions and commitment behind them. I’ve personally seen a number of well designed and well intentioned development centres fall down in the later stages due to the following reasons:
Failure to carry out proper follow up activities in a timely manner after the event
Not integrating the detailed information collected into robust personal development plans (PDPs)
The information being unexpectedly ‘hijacked’ by more senior levels of management to inform a previously unannounced restructure or round of promotions
Find out more.
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