Custom Leadership Development Programs

Creating lasting change in the way your leaders think and operate

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Custom leadership development is crucial to performance

Your organization is a living, breathing eco-system with people at the center. No one is like the other. To develop the right leaders at the right time for your organization requires more than just knowledge transfer to your people.

Leadership development is crucial to performance. Organizations work better, communicate better and see more financial return. The data backs this up. And this is done best when it’s carefully fitted to your organization’s context and needs.

Want to be customer obsessed? Need more agile leadership? Ramp up productivity? We can help.

Our custom leadership solutions

From one to many, across all levels. From high touch to high tech, we work with you to help leaders reach their potential and, in turn, realize yours. Here’s how:

Our custom leadership development solutions begin by getting to know each organization inside and out. We then work with you to design and implement talent development portfolios and journeys that are customized, personalized and scalable, implementing the right solution, with the right people — at the right time for the organization.

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C-suite & senior executives

One of our most powerful approaches is our leadership immersions—carefully designed magical moments that we tie together to create a movement, a tipping point that shifts the culture of your organization.

We design two types of immersions—those that improve where you are now, and those that put leaders where you need to be in the future. What they have in common is that they take you out of your environment—physically or virtually—to experience someone else’s world.

These experiences get leadership teams thinking and feeling differently about their challenges, they deliver transformational behavior change and a personal impact that many remember for the rest of their life.

  • Strategy, immersion & alignment programs: Put your best minds together to work on challenges and opportunities to drive tangible business outcomes, executive alignment and culture change.
  • Senior leadership team development: We work with senior teams and draw upon research-based, time-tested methodologies to accelerate team alignment, performance and shared purpose.
  • Tailored one-to-one executive coaching: Helps senior executives adapt to real change and develop new ways of thinking.
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High potentials

Today, developing high potentials is about preparing them for the unknown. We create leadership journeys that build the skillsets and mindsets that enable your most talented individuals to take on broader leadership roles in an increasingly disruptive world.

We draw on a wide variety of learning strategies and methods, blending our standardized leadership solutions with custom elements to create a journey that delivers capabilities required for your business strategy, culture and talent agenda. While every program is unique, they can include:

  • Action learning programs and incubators: Tackle real-life business problems as they prepare to take on broader leadership roles
  • Strategy activation, group and immersion experiences: Using a variety of live and virtual strategies, accelerate the development of high-potential talent to rise to challenges and seize opportunities
  • Relationship building: Broad exposure to other business, including meaningful exposure to the executive team. Activities that foster deliberate peer relationship-building
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Mid-level & first-time managers

  • Skills cascade & alignment programs: Targeted learning experiences focus on identifying and building critical skills for first-level leaders and middle-level managers.
  • Applied learning programs: Managers apply new leadership behaviors to real world problems to test and develop their capabilities.

What we do

Personalized leadership & professional development for every individual

You need individuals with the skills that will help you transform your business. Through technology and science we can personalize leadership and professional development for every individual in your organization, from your top team to new graduate recruits. The result? Leaders and teams who reach their potential and realize yours. We do this in four primary ways:

Let us be part of your success story

Contact us and see how our consulting services can help you achieve your business goals.

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Our experts

Our experts are the best at what they do. We work with your team as an honest and inclusive partner to achieve and exceed your business goals, and we have the knowledge, expertise and experience to help you achieve greatness.

Talk to a Leadership & Professional Development expert

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FAQs for leadership development

Why are leadership development programs important?

Leadership development programs drive organizational change and progress. The most successful leadership programs have these characteristics in common:

  • They drive the organization’s strategy and advance its corporate agenda.
  • They cultivate a strong and differentiated leadership bench and talent pipeline, so organizations can execute their strategies for both today and tomorrow.
  • They promote culture change that aligns with the organization’s business strategy and goals.
  • They build a more purpose-focused, sustainable and socially conscious organization.

Leadership development programs are also important now because many organizations suffer from a leadership gap. Our research has shown that as many as 20% of organizations may not have the leaders they need to deliver on strategic priorities.

A lack of talent to fulfill mission-critical roles (as and when needed) can put a business at risk competitively. It may also mean that organizations have to go outside their four walls to recruit skill sets that they could have developed in internal candidates.

Should leadership development programs be customized?

To be most effective, leadership programs need to meet current and future leaders where they are. That means there’s no one-size-fits-all solution that will address every person’s needs. That’s because leadership development isn’t just transferring knowledge. It’s developing skills that will sustain your talent and your organization as a whole.

Strong leadership programs start with an understanding of the organization and its strategies and goals. Talent development journeys must be tailored to the organization and its culture as well as to its vision of where it wants to be in the future. Then you can craft experiences that help your leadership teams think and feel differently about their roles and their challenges. You can set these experiences up to develop a group of leaders by solving problems and aligning around business outcomes. Or you can coach senior leaders one on one to develop specific skills.

Why should organizations invest in leadership development programs?

Given the pace of change resulting from technological advancements, globalization and other disruptions, organizations need leaders who are ready and able to respond effectively to constantly evolving business opportunities and threats. They must also be capable of charting a path to sustainable growth. Recent changes require leaders to lead and work differently than they ever have before. And that requires a strategic leadership development program, both to address gaps in current leaders and to build a bench of potentials ready to lead in the future.

Leadership development programs help organizations cultivate leaders who can drive strategy, build their talent pipeline, develop a culture that aligns with their strategic goals and create a culture that is purposeful, socially conscious and inspiring. These programs can also help organizations focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Organizations need to develop more women leaders and leaders from underrepresented communities and points of view. Executives must ensure their leadership development programs welcome these individuals and ensure they are building a culture that is as inclusive as possible.

Why do leadership development programs fail?

There’s no simple answer to this question, but in general, leadership development programs fail when organizations don’t make them a part of their overall business strategy. In our research and work with clients, we’ve noticed several recurring problems that contribute to leadership development programs falling short:

  • A lack of alignment between the leadership development strategy and the business strategy
  • Disconnected and sometimes contradictory programs at different levels of the organization
  • Visible behaviors at the top that do not reflect messaging and priorities conveyed to levels deeper in the organization
  • Programs that benefit either the individual or the organization but not both
  • A theoretical approach to leadership development that does not translate the development concepts into practical reality
  • Outdated delivery models that don’t put learners at the center of the process
  • Neglect of cultural aspects in an organization that allow leadership to thrive
  • A lack of qualitative and quantitative analyses to document impact and outcomes
  • Assumptions that time spent in leadership development is not as valuable as “working” time
  • A lack of strong governance models to guide effective and strategic investment in leadership development

These challenges are hard but not insurmountable. Overcoming them requires a deliberate, focused approach that narrows the gap between strategy and execution.