Feeding Your Leadership Pipeline: How to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders

SARAH SHAFER: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar, Feeding Your Leadership Pipeline: How to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders, hosted by HRDQU and presented by Daniel Tobin. Today’s webinar will last around one hour. If you have any questions you can always type them into the questions box. We’ll be answering these questions as they come in live at the end of the presentation or as a follow-up by email. My name is Sarah Shafer and I will moderate today’s webinar.

With more than 30 years of experience in the learning and development field, author Dan Tobin has served as a training director in several high-tech companies and as a vice president of program design and development for the American Management Association. As a consultant and speaker, he has given workshops and keynotes on five continents and has consulted to HR and training groups around the world as well as an accomplished author. Welcome, Dan, and thank you for joining us today

DAN TOBIN: Thank you, Sarah and welcome to everyone. Good afternoon or good morning depending on where you are. Several years ago I interviewed the head of power generation which was the largest division of a midsized electric utility. And during the interview he said to me that nine of the top 11 people in this business unit, including himself, were eligible to retire in the next three years. And then he said I have no idea who is going to replace them. Many companies find themselves in this predicament. They are facing a lot of retirement especially the baby boomers, and they’ve done nothing to build their leadership pipeline to prepare for the next generation of leadership. And that’s what this seminar and this model are all about. I asked him have you thought about building the leadership development program? What have you been doing to develop your next generation of leaders? And he got rather testy. He said, I sent one bright young guy to a very expensive leadership program at one of the better-known vendors of leadership programs. He said it cost me a small fortune. Nothing changed. It was a total waste. Well, I happen to know this program. I sent several people to it over the years. It’s an excellent program. So I went to talk with the young guy and I asked him about the program and he said you know, it was a really great program. And he said I learned a lot, I changed a lot, he said then I got back here as I went to see my boss he said go catch up on your work. Then, once I caught up on it I went to him I offered a few ideas I developed during the program. He said everything is working fine there is no need to change anything, get back to work. He was totally frustrated. No wonder nothing changed. Nothing was open to change.

So, let me start off with a poll. What has your company done, what steps has your company taken thus far to build your leadership pipeline? Have you A. Identified high potential employees? B. Developed succession plans for key positions? C. Have you sent candidates to external leadership development programs? D. Have you instituted an internal leadership development program?

So let’s take a few minutes and let’s see what people have done. You should be able to answer more than one. Well I’m seeing that just about half of you have instituted internal development leadership programs. And that’s great. The numbers for A, B, and C identifying your high potential employees only about 20%. So let me share that with you.

The 20% have identified high potential employees; about 14% have developed succession plans for key positions; 17% have sent people to external leadership programs; and just about half have instituted an internal leadership development program. I guess my question for you, I will not ask you to answer right now, is if you have instituted an internal leadership development program, who’s in it if only 20% of you have identified your high potentials?

So, let’s move on. About half a century ago a man named Lawrence J. Peter wrote a book called the Peter Principle, and it’s a very interesting book. If you’ve never seen it, I recommend it, it’s still available. The Peter Principle states that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Well, you know, that sounds pretty discouraging. But if you think about it, it’s true. If we have somebody who comes in as an individual contributor, we may promote that person if they have done a very good job. If after the promotion they continue to do a very good job we may promote them again. And if in a new position they do a great job we promote them again. And we keep promoting them until they don’t do such a great job. And they tend to get stuck in the position where they are not performing well. Very few companies would offer that kind of person an opportunity to go back to that level below where they were doing a good job. Now, the solution to the Peter Principle is that we have to prepare people. We have to prepare them for each promotion. And that’s the whole idea of building a leadership pipeline.

Now, there is one company over the last 30 or 40 years that has been highlighted as having probably the best leadership development approach of any company in the country. Perhaps in the world. They have grown all of their CEOs themselves. And many of the people that didn’t make it to the CEO level in their company became CEOs of other companies. Anybody want to guess what the company is? Well, the company is General Electric. They have always grown their own CEOs. They have always promoted the next CEO from within their own ranks. And there are many, many other Fortune 500 companies whose CEOs graduated from the General Electric leadership school. Now General Electric has probably invested more in leadership development than any other company that I know of. They have this beautiful leadership development Center up in Crotonville, New York, not far from where I live and managers of all levels go to programs there one or more weeks a year. When Jack Welsh was the CEO of General Electric he used to teach in those programs and talk about a commitment of the CEO to leadership development. He was scheduled in his career as CEO to teaching those programs more than 500 times. And he only missed one session. And the one session he missed was because he was having heart bypass surgery in Boston. So the smaller midsize companies you have the problem of not having large leadership development staffs or budgets that GE would have. You don’t have a leadership development center like GE’s Crotonville. But you do still have an immediate need to develop the next generation of leaders.

So, let’s look at how we generate leaders. How do we get people the skills, the wisdom, the knowledge they need in order to become leaders? Not just the CEO of the company, but remember that every business unit, every functional area needs leaders. Whether it’s a business unit, whether it’s the sales function, the engineering function, the HR function, the IS function within your company, they all need leaders.

So, the four stages of learning is a model that has been around for a long time and let me just spend a minute going through it. Stage one is data and we are all inundated with data. Every email and text message we get is data. Every brochure, everything we take in with all of our senses is data. And we are all being swamped by it. Peter Drucker said that when you take data and you give it relevance, and you give it purpose, it becomes information. So as people who are putting together leadership development programs, we need to make sure that whatever we are teaching people that it has relevance to their work, that it has purpose. That it is something they can use. To transfer information into knowledge you have to use it, okay? I can read books about how to ride a bicycle. I can watch videos. I can watch other people do it. But I can’t say that I know how to ride a bicycle until I get onto a bicycle and actually demonstrate that skill. And then the fourth stage which is what we always want in our leaders is wisdom. And wisdom comes from experience, intuition, experimentation. You can’t teach wisdom. But wisdom can be passed on through dialogue and demonstration.

So let’s look at how we build this model into a leadership development program. Okay, we start off learning. We put together education sessions for our high potentials. And remember in those education sessions we want to make sure we are giving them information. Giving them things that are relevant to their work, relevant to the company’s needs, okay, and for which they have a purpose. By having a purpose I mean that something they can turn around and use. That leads to the second stage which is application. For every education session you put together I recommend that you have action learning projects. They can be individual or group projects, we will talk about them more in a couple of minutes. It gives the people an opportunity to immediately start applying what they have learned. And by applying what they have learned you are turning it into their personal knowledge. And then reflection. Reflection is part of what creates wisdom. We ask people to after the end at the end of each of their action learning projects to debrief what it is they did, report on what they did, report on obstacles that they met and overcame or didn’t overcome, and talk about what they learned in the projects.

So these are the four basic elements of the model. We have formal education programs. In the model that I put together when I first developed this, this is a series of 2 to 3 day workshops done in person. We brought all of the participants together and that’s an important part of this. It wasn’t done over the web. It wasn’t done as a webinar. It wasn’t done as e-learning. We brought the people together for 2 to 3 days of education. At the end of the program, we assigned action learning projects to people either as teams or as individuals to give the people an opportunity to start applying what they learned in the program. There were eight of these programs, eight education programs done quarterly over a two-year period. So there were eight action learning projects, some team-based, some individual-based. Also for each of the participants we developed an individual development plan. We did a 360 evaluation on each of the high potentials in the program. From the 360 and from the discussions with them and their managers, and their HR reps we came up with an individual development plan. Not every topic that given individual needs to learn is going to be powered by the LDP. So, in the individual development plans we focused on the specific needs of each individual in the program talking about needs that were above and beyond what we are teaching in the program. And then the fourth element is mentoring and coaching. We set up each of the participants with a mentor from senior management and as needed the individual development plans we arranged for coaches in certain topics.

So, let’s say you are putting together a program, you’re going to have four or six or eight education sessions. What are one or two topics you would like to see as part of the education session? So, could you answer that? Okay, I see budgeting and planning, I see business acumen, building confidence, building trust, communication and listening skills, analytics, building confidence, building accountability, building next level leaders below them, bringing up the next level, business strategy, all good topics.

Okay, in the design of the program they said we have a series of instructor led programs on a variety of three different kinds of topics: leadership skills, absolutely business acumen, you can have a leader who doesn’t really know the business or hasn’t developed an understanding of the business. And thirdly you need execution topics. A leader may have a great vision for the company, but if he doesn’t know or she doesn’t know how to put together a plan to achieve that vision, they are not going to be very effective. So it’s a combination of those three types. Leadership topics, business acumen, and execution topics.

Your faculty may include business school professors, consultants, training vendors, and company executives. In my book, I have a whole series of questions or criteria and how to choose faculty. If you’re going to use company executives, they can be very effective. They have to make sure that they are comfortable in the role, that they are knowledgeable, that they are good instructors, and that they are going to follow through. The worst thing I ever saw was in one company where the CEO said I’m going to teach a three day session for the leadership development program. He showed up the first day at the end of the first day he said I’ve got an emergency, I’ve got to leave and called off the rest of the program. Well, what kind of message does that give to the participants?

Selecting topics. You want topics that are needed by the participants and that focus on the specific business challenges being faced by the company.

Action learning projects. Each session is followed by an action learning project. And at the beginning of the next session, and the program that I originally put together, they were quarterly programs, so three months later, at the beginning of the next program the participants reported on results of their action learning projects to a panel of executives. Now, how do you choose action learning projects? You need to think about several criteria. One is they have to be things that are important but not vital to the company’s health. When I first started working in the training field, I worked for a large computer company in a group called software services training. And while I was in that group, we had to move offices from one building to another. And my manager, in cleaning out his files to get ready for the move, have found some meeting minutes from our quarterly meetings of the group from five and six years earlier. Only looked at those meeting notes from five and six years earlier we saw that there were a lot of the same issues being discussed today as had been discussed five or six years earlier. What that means is that those issues were important or they wouldn’t have been brought up at the meeting, but they weren’t urgent. They weren’t urgent enough or vital enough to really get the attention of the management of the group so that so they would assign somebody to solve the problem. Those are perfect kinds of projects to give to your high potentials as part of their action learning. Because if they can come up with a solution to the problem, all the better. They will solve an important company problem. And if they don’t, you are no worse off than you were before. So you can help solve some long-standing company challenges through the action learning project.

The individual development plan, that’s the third element. We conducted a 360 assessment on each participant. We developed an individual development plan for each participant. And when we looked at the overall results for all of the participants, it suggested some ideas for future sessions in the program.

Coaching and mentoring. A lot of people use those terms interchangeably. I make a distinction between coaches and mentoring. Coaching focuses on job-related skills and competencies. It’s to help people develop the knowledge or skill they need to do some part of their job. Mentoring, on the other hand, focuses on company history and culture, knowledge of the industry, and career paths. I remember when I published my first book my publisher told me about that when he started off as a junior editor at a major publishing house he had been assigned a mentor who was a senior vice president of the company who had been in the industry for 25 or 30 years. He said they had lunch once a month and he said during those 12 lunches he had with the man he learned more about the industry, about how the company worked, about the culture of the company and the industry and about what he could plan for a career path than he could have done on his own in 5 to 10 years. So that’s what mentoring really focuses on. Everyone in the program could really use a mentor. Coaching, it depends on what the topic is, whether it’s part of the program, or whether it’s something else that each individual needs to work on in addition to the program.

So, one more poll. Does your company have A. A formal mentoring program? B. A formal coaching program? C. Both coaching and mentoring? D. Neither? Okay let me share the results here. Formal mentoring program, 18%; coaching program only 10%; both coaching and mentoring, 20%; that means that 30% have coaching and 38% have mentoring; and neither is 51%. Not uncommon, but something you might think about with or without a leadership development program.

Okay, so what are the priorities? Let’s say that you really don’t have the time or the resources to do all four of these things. Well, the key to me is the combination of the education programs and the action learning projects. That’s where the real learning takes place that’s where the real synergies can be found. So, if you have to start somewhere, I’d start with the combination of those two.

Now, a lot of people want to know what’s the role of executives in your leadership development program. Well, there are number of roles they can play. They can select the participants. How do you identify high potentials? In most companies if you have good HR business partners and good executives in the various business units and functions, they could probably sit down as a pair of people and identify who are the high potential people within the division or the function. So definitely there is a role for them to play in the selection of participants for your LDP. Secondly, selecting topics for education sessions and/or the action learning projects. Ask them what they think people need. It may vary from company to company. Ask them if the group of high potentials were developed to develop a set of one skill or set of several skills, what skills would you recommend that you think would really make a difference in the future of the company? Third, they could teach or co-teach some of the information sessions. Again, make sure that if they’re going to teach that they are good teachers. That they will make the commitment, both the commitment to prepare and a commitment to teach. I generally have found that co-teaching with an outside consultant or business school professor can be very effective. For example, in one LDP that I put together the session on finance, INAUDIBLE corporate finance and it was budgeting and reading balance sheets and income statements and we had a simulation that this professor brought in that was very effective for a day and a half in teaching the vocabulary. But then the CFO came in and started talking about what do these numbers mean for the company. How does our company compared to other companies based on these kinds of measures? What are the key measures that you as participants can affect? It was very, very effective.

The fourth way they can participate is by giving after dinner presentations and holding discussions with the participants. In the company where I first developed this we got a new CEO just after the program was announced. And he was very busy and he didn’t show up for the first two sessions. But finally got him to the third session and what I said to him was I said what I would like you to do is come in and spend 15 to 20 minutes talking about your own leadership journey. How did you get to where you are? And then I would like you to open it up to any and all questions that the participants have for you. And he said, well how long will that go? And I said it should go as long as there are more questions. Well, we happened to be holding the session at Cambridge University in the UK and we are in this beautiful dining hall that dated back to the 15th century and we had this very formal dinner and after the dinner was over the CEO got up and he spent his 20 minutes talking about his leadership journey and then he opened it up for questions. Well, about 11 PM the dining manager for the University came in and said that we really couldn’t stay there anymore because they had to clean up the room and get it ready for the next day’s session. So, our CEO said well, where can we go? And it was during the summer, he says well we have this student pub right next door. It’s normally closed but I will have someone open it up for you. So they went into the pub and they cracked a barrel of ale. About 1 o’clock in the morning the University person came in and said you know, we really need to close up for the night. And the CEO said let me pay you for the rest of the barrel of ale and we will lock up when we are done. And the session went until 3:30 in the morning. And everyone including the CEO thought it was the best session that they have ever had. And the CEO who hadn’t been able to find time to attend either of the first two sessions never missed another session for the length of the program.

Another way you can involve the executives, have them sit on the evaluation panels for the action learning projects. You’re going to get to see a lot of people who aren’t normally in their range of vision. For most executives and most companies their view of company personnel is usually limited mostly to their own division or function and only goes down one or two levels. By sitting on these evaluation panels you’re going to get to see a lot more of the talent across the organization.

And then finally they can act as coaches and mentors.

Okay so let me tell you about the first time I put this model together. I had been hired into a high-tech company of about 1,600 employees. The company hadn’t been doing well. There had been several rounds of layoffs; there had been salary reductions in forced furloughs. Attrition was more than 15% per year. When I originally interviewed with the senior vice president of human resources, who was my boss, putting together this leadership development program was the first priority. But when I arrived to start the job, she said you know it’s really not the right time to do this. And every few months I would ask her about it and it was never the right time to do it. And about 18 months into my being there she called me in on one Thursday afternoon and she said you know we really have to put together this program. I said fine, I will put together a plan for you. The next morning I handed her a 10 page plan, which is essentially what this model is. And she looked through it and she said this is terrific, how did you get it done so fast? And I said well you have to realize I’ve been working on it for 15 years. It’s the model is based on my own experiences as well as dozens of companies around the world with which I have done consulting or collected data or visited for the books I have written.

So, we started the program. We had 36 mid-level managers who had been identified as having high potential for future leadership roles in the company. Starting with the first session the feedback we were getting from the participants were, you know, the education session was terrific, but just by bringing these three dozen people together, from all the different business units and functions from all the geographies around the world, it would’ve been worth the company’s investment just to have a sit and talk with each other for three days without even having an education session. The other reaction of the participants was many of them said, you know the company has not been doing well, I’ve had my resume out on the street, been thinking about leaving, but if the company is going to invest in my future here, I’m going to stick around. And at the end of the two-year program, we had 35 of the 36 people still with the company. The one who actually left, left after the first session because he said he had some family problems that he was dealing with that he just couldn’t devote the time to the program that he thought was going to be neither and please when we run the program again include him.

So, let’s talk about what results, what kind of expectations you can set for your leadership development programs. Number one, and probably the most obvious one is that the participants would develop the leadership skills, business acumen and execution skills they need for future leadership roles in your company. Number two, you’ll expand your company’s pool of talent for use in succession planning. And remember that succession planning, many companies say yeah we definitely have succession plans in place for our CEO or for each of the C level officers. Well, you absolutely need those, but you also need leadership in functional areas in your business units. And, you need a pool of talent so that you have people who are ready when a vacancy occurs. Number three you will retain some top talent you might otherwise have lost. That certainly was the case in the company where I started this program. Number four, through action learning projects you will solve some long-standing company challenges. Number five, you will make your top talent more visible to company executives. As I said, most executives in the middle to large size company have little view of their employees beyond their own business units or functional areas down one or two levels. Well, this makes your top talent more visible across functions, across geographies. Number six, LDP participants will improve their performance in their current jobs. We expect them to apply what they are learning not just in a future role, not just in the action learning projects, but in their current jobs. And we’ve seen some great results from it. Number seven is an often overlooked one that I think is very important. You weed out some high potentials who fail to perform in the LDP. In every company I have worked for, there has been at least one example where a senior-level person in the company leaves for whatever reason. And the CEO says, you know there is a really bright young guy or gal that just did this terrific project with great results over in this business unit. I am going to promote that person. And they go ahead and promote the person and when that person comes into the new job they are so full of themselves that they come in with all the answers, well, without asking any questions. And they so alienate the current staff that several key senior people in that function or business unit end up leaving the company. And 12 or 18 months later after this business unit has had a dramatic drop in results, the CEO has little choice but to get rid of that person. Through the LDP, through the action learning project you get to weed out some people who won’t make great leaders before you promote them. And, number eight, you will help company executives feel more connected to many parts of the business. I told you about the CEO spending till 3:30 in the morning with the participants, just in dialogue. He certainly felt more connected with what was happening in the company then he had in the six months that he had been in that position. And every executive that I had come in and do a similar after dinner presentation and a Q and A session gave us the same feedback. They never felt more connected to parts of the business than they had after the session.

So, I think these are all reasonable expectations for the program. So what are the steps in implementing the program? First you need to identify your high potentials. Second, choose your program design. The program I had put together with eight sessions over two years. I suggest you need at least four sessions maybe six, maybe eight, I think quarterly is the right time period to keep the momentum going. Select the topics, remember leadership topics as well as building business acumen as well as execution skills. Set up a mentoring program. Find coaches for those people who need them. Write your individual development plans for each participant. Get your company executives involved in the program. And of course we want to do it all on a modest budget.

Now, in the book, we’ve got higher and lower cost alternatives. For example, I’ll just give you one example. Leadership skills: Well, you can go out and get one of the top name gurus in the leadership field to come in and do a session for your people. It may cost you $25-$50,000 to do that. But the result of the same business schools where those people work, you’ll find some young assistant professors who have experience in the schools’ executive education programs who are great presenters, know their stuff or they wouldn’t have been appointed to that school, but they cost a whole lot less. 30 years ago I hired a brand-new assistant professor to help with the program out of Harvard Business School. The guy was terrific his name was Nitin Nohria, young assistant professor he had been there for one year. He did a great job on the program. Today he is the Dean of the school. If I were to try to hire him today I wouldn’t get him for $1,500 a day it would be more like $15,000 or $20,000 a day. Thing to remember is the total cost of your leadership development program will be less than making a single poor promotional decision. A poor promotional decision can cost the company millions of dollars. There’s a question for your CEO, what’s the cost to your company of not developing the next generation of leaders?

There are other ways besides the model that I present of helping to develop leaders. Some people send their key high potential employees to an external leadership development program like the business unit had from the electric company. In a minute I will talk to you about if you are going to do that, how you can make sure you get a return on your investment. Another model that is fairly popular is to have your company work with a business school or other leadership development program vendor to provide an intensive week long program, where on day one day to finance, on day two they do marketing, on day three they do operations management, and so on. The problem with that is your jamming too much into one week, and you are not giving people the opportunity to start applying what they learned to turn all that information into knowledge. Many companies say let the cream rise to the top. We are not going to do anything. The real leaders are going to emerge. We don’t have to do anything other than do good hiring and hire lots of people until we see who rises to the top. And then finally hiring leadership talent from the outside, if you don’t have the talent inside you then end up going outside and that can be costly as well.

So, let’s say you are going to send an employee to an external program. Well, the problem with the electric company was they never assessed what the employees learning needs were. And if you don’t know what the needs are you can’t find the appropriate program. Third, you need to set expectations with the employee before they go to the program. What do we expect you to learn? How do we expect you to apply that learning once you get back? At the end of the program when they come back, you can’t as they did with this electric company just say okay go catch up on your work, you need to debrief them about what they learned, how they changed, what they wanted to do. And then set up goals in the reporting mechanism for the employee. And finally, and most importantly, follow through on those goals.

So, Sarah, let’s turn it over for some Q & A.

SARAH: All right, perfect, thank you so much. And, yes, we do have a little bit of time for that Q & A. So, attendees, why don’t you go ahead and send me those questions right now, and while we wait for some of those questions to filter in, let me share a little bit on how you can keep in touch. Dan’s contact information is on that slide listed right there. And then also if you would like to check out his book you can do so on nextgenerationofleaders.com and as well as Amazon.com. And then for us, if you want to connect with us, we are on all the regular social media channels, and don’t forget to sign up for our weekly webinar Wednesdays at HRDQU.com.

All right, perfect, and we do have a number of questions coming in. It looks like our first question is coming from Brian: What subjects should be included in a leadership development program?

DAN: Okay, well we have a number of suggestions and they were all good suggestions. Certainly you need to focus on leadership skills. Leadership skills can include things like how to create a vision and sell that vision. One of the most important set of skills that research has shown that great leaders have is emotional intelligence. And there are certainly a bunch of good emotional intelligence speakers and programs out there that you can bring in. Okay, so you have leadership skills. Secondly, building business acumen. There are number of very good simulations. If you want to send me an email, I’d be happy to refer you to some companies that have some really excellent computer-based and game-based simulations that can really help people understand the larger picture than just the function or the business unit that they are in. And then third, execution skills. Execution skills can be project management or program management. It can be certainly financial analysis and budgeting, communication skills, strategic planning, all of those topics. In the book I have an appendix with a dozen different topics and just an outline of what those topics would be, could be and what kinds of action learning projects you could assign for each one of those topics.

SARAH: All right, thank you. Looks like our next question is coming from Iman: How can I develop myself to be a leader?

DAN: There are several things you can do. You can get yourself educated on each of those three areas, leadership skills, the execution skills and the business acumen. For business acumen, be curious beyond your own job. Find out how did your job fit into the big picture of what the company is doing. Who is your customer, who takes the work that you do and then has to work with that? Execution skills, learn from your mistakes. Ask your manager for coaching. If you see somebody who has a set of skills that, they’re really good at this, I wish I was that good, well asked them how they develop those skills. But the point of this program is for the company to plan to develop their high potentials rather than you as an individual. As an individual, look at work by people like David Ulrich and Jim Kouzes they’ve got some excellent books and some workbooks for individuals on how to become a leader.

SARAH: It looks like our next one is coming from Elaine: Can you mix a variety of levels of employees in an LDP?

DAN: You can, but it probably, I recommend that it can be most effective when you get people from the same level. The reason being that they are working on the same kinds of problems if they are in the same level. One thing you absolutely want to avoid is you want to avoid having an employee and his or her manager being in the same program because that really makes them hesitant to really talk about issues that they are having. Because they are afraid to expose weaknesses or talk about conflict that they are having with the other person.

SARAH: Okay, perfect, and it looks like our next question is coming from Chad: why do high potentials need an individual development plan in addition to the leadership development program?

DAN: The individual development plans, every individual is different. And each one may have some needs that other people in the program don’t have. For example, someone may be a poor presenter and you really want to have work with them on presentation skills. Just as one example. Another person may have some interpersonal conflict skills. I just saw something the other day where a young woman employee is interviewing for a job in the HR manager asked her what her greatest weakness is and she said my honesty. And the HR manager says I don’t consider honesty a weakness. And, she says, to be honest with you, I don’t give a damn what you think. Well, that person has some work to do, maybe not in terms of honesty, but in terms of tact. And hopefully not all of the participants in your program are going to have that same problem. So the IDP is there to take care of a special problem that the participant is having that’s outside the scope of the program.

SARAH: All right, great, thank you. And it looks like we probably just have time for one more question, and this question is coming from Beth: What roles can company executives play in a company’s leadership development program and how do you get them to participate?

DAN: Well, there was a whole list of roles they can play. I think the most important thing is to get a champion. If you can get the CEO to say this is important, or even the head of one business unit, who really recognizes the importance of doing this, they will help convince their peers.

SARAH: Do you want to go ahead and add any final thoughts and then I’ll just go ahead and wrap up the session then?

DAN: Well I hope that you learned something about the LDP model that I’ve developed here. If you see in the handout the slide from Jim Kouzes is one of the gurus of leadership development he was very kind in saying how comprehensive he found this book even though it’s a relatively short book, just under 200 pages. If there’s any way I can help you, you have my contact information. And as I said, any questions that are left after we end, I will be answering in writing and Sarah at HRDQ will be sending this out to all of the participants. And thank you for attending.

SARAH: All right, yes, Dan, thank you so much. And again, we will be sending those questions out that Dan answers, you will probably receive those probably like mid next week. So we appreciate your time and we hope you found today’s webinar informative. Thank you.