Anna Odumodu
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For organizations to navigate change successfully, having resilient, effective, and human-centered leadership is vital for continued success. Being a successful leader isn’t about sitting at the head of the table – it’s about galvanizing teams, adapting to challenges, and leading by example.
For sustainable leadership growth and development, dynamic and well-defined goals are key – as is being able to inspire others to these goals.
Why you need leadership development goals
Leadership development goals should complement and run in parallel to your strategic business objectives, acting as part of that roadmap for growth. They are an opportunity to show you what you’re doing well, and what you might need to work on to achieve success. Every goal that you commit to completing is a mark of improvement, giving you the chance and means to develop your leaders – whether that is in communicating more clearly, better supporting their teams, building new skills, or realizing change.
By defining and working on specific goals, you’ll be better equipped to facilitate collaboration across your organization, encourage innovation and adaptability, and promote a positive workplace attitude that will support any transitions you face.
Creating leadership development goals
Often, the goals organizations set for leadership development are vague, such as “better decision-making”, with no understanding of how they will manifest itself ‘on the job’ or plan behind them to measure their success or progress.
There are many ways to create your leadership development goals, such as the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound), but whichever method you use, it’s important to define a clear aim, how you’ll achieve it and assess it, and a deadline to encourage you to make considered and realistic objectives.
Leadership development should consider both vertical and horizontal development. Horizontal development refers to knowledge, skills, and competencies at a certain organizational level, whereas vertical development pertains elements such as mindset and self-awareness that cross all roles and levels. The former is needed to develop specific skillsets and build your people’s knowledge, but at the senior leadership level, it’s vertical development that will grow empathy and adaptability, and improve their ability to handle and lead through change.
Some overarching goals may have both horizontal and vertical elements to them. For example, becoming a more empathetic leader requires good communication, active listening, and knowing how to provide supportive feedback; these are specific skills that can be learned, making them horizontal. But it also requires self-awareness, the ability to see another person’s perspective, and a strong grasp on human interactions; these may involve a shift in mindset, making them vertical.
If you had the goal of developing more empathy in leadership, you begin by making it specific and time-bound. For example, the goal could be to deepen leaders’ understanding of diverse perspectives over the next 18 months to enhance their ability to lead inclusively and foster trust during difficult change periods. It could be partly measured through team surveys, which provide a helpful indicator of perception but is better measured through the strategic objectives you seek to achieve.
By breaking goals down into specific steps, you give yourself a clear roadmap to follow, which makes your goals more realistic and sustainable.
How do you define your leadership development goals?
It’s important to understand your people’s strengths and development areas, as this will help you decide which overarching goals to focus on. From there, you can then break them down into more specific aims or achievements.
Some possible overarching development goals that are important for navigating change, and how they might break down into more specific elements, are:
Increased emotional intelligence: this could encompass greater self-awareness around values and emotions, and enhanced social awareness in leaders through engaging with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Clearer communication: this could be in the form of verbal communication, written communication, or even non-verbal communication such as body language. This could also cover improving active listening skills.
Better cross-functional collaboration: this could be done by establishing clear communication channels and protocols to share information proactively, focussing on finding common ground and mutually beneficial solutions to issues, or working to align cross-functional teams around common objectives.
Enhanced decision-making: this could be broken down into developing analytical and critical thinking skills to evaluate information and draw logical conclusions free from bias, brainstorming diverse solutions and assessing the risks and benefits of potential courses of action, or improving decision implementation by developing clear plans, effective communication, and establishing metrics for evaluation.
These are just a few examples; there are plenty of other areas that are vital to change leadership for you to consider.
Ultimately, to guide an organization through change, a leader must be effective and efficient, with confidence, strategic thinking, and strong communication skills. And once you break your overarching goals down into smaller parts, it will be easier to define how you can achieve and assess them.
“In learning and development, we are very used to certain jargonistic language around what we need from our leaders, or what we seek to achieve. We need to become much more explicit about the change we seek, or the behaviour we believe will support strategic success. The more explicit we can be, the more we can show leaders a pathway to that success, and the more we can focus leadership development on elements that can support them get there”
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Anna Odumodu
Vice President Custom Solutions at Hult Ashridge Executive Education
As Head of Custom Solutions at Hult Ashridge, Anna brings over two decades of expertise in creating custom learning and development solutions that drive change and sustainable growth for organizations. Passionate about understanding and meeting client needs, her current focus is on measuring the impact of learning interventions. Drawing on 10 years as a civil engineer managing multi-million pound projects, Anna brings this rigor and structure to her L&D work. She holds an Executive MBA with Distinction from Bayes Business School.
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