The State of Organizations 2023 - Flipbook - Page 53
develop a five-year workforce projection linked to
the company’s value-creation agenda. Which skills
are most critical for delivering on the company’s
strategy, and what would happen if people with these
skills weren’t available? With this information in hand,
the CEO can build a workforce plan that quantifies
skill needs and outlines potential pathways to find
the right people—for instance, traditional hiring and
capability building, as well as nontraditional options
(such as apprenticeships and role redesign). The
CEO can also use this workforce plan to prioritize
investments in the development or curation of
multimodal learning, ecosystem partnerships
focused on up- or reskilling, or other means to elevate
mission-critical roles and build foundational skills
across the organization.
an organization is 2.4 times more likely to achieve
performance targets if it has a focus on developing
leaders and that transformations are more than
five times more likely to succeed if leaders model
the desired behavioral changes.
Investing in leadership
Organizations tend to underinvest in leadership
development, often aren’t clear about which
mindsets and behaviors they should focus on building
in new leaders, and rarely (if ever) measure the impact
of leadership development programs. Consider that
only 33 percent of C-suite executives in a McKinsey
survey say their capability-building programs always
or often achieve business impact, and 45 percent say
they don’t have a clear plan for building high-priority
capabilities. That’s likely because most organizations
think of leadership development as a program rather
than a transformative, holistic, “leading self” journey.
If talent is the lifeblood of organizations, leaders
are the heartbeat. They are the ones who keep
ideas, people, and workstreams moving and who
enable an organization to achieve breakthrough
performance. Leaders are a heterogeneous bunch,
working at different levels and affecting different
areas of the organization. But their collective
influence matters. McKinsey research shows that
To refocus organizations on the importance of at
scale leadership development, CEOs can start by
identifying the leadership behaviors required to help
their organizations meet strategy objectives and
realize stated visions and aspirations. For instance, if
an organization is seeking to become more agile, the
leadership mindset will need to shift from controller
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