How to Build a Next Generation Leadership Team

Your next generation leadership team is seeking the personalized supports they need to become the leaders your organization is in demand of. These high-potential team members are eager to make a difference, and with the right leadership development plan, they will.

What are Next Generation Leaders?

Next generation leaders are the individuals, within your organization, who can be anywhere from 21 to 38 years of age. They may not have any formal leadership experience just yet, but they demonstrate the qualities of a good leader and have leadership skills that align with your organizational values and goals.

These emerging leaders are likely already raising their hands and expressing interest in becoming your next generation of leaders. They are the people who will appreciate and flourish with a strategic leadership development plan.

What Our Future Leaders Need to Thrive in a Workplace

Next generation leaders may differ from those who are currently in formal leadership roles. These young leaders are looking for particular resources and supports to be at their best. In a workplace, future leaders will need:

• Flexibility, including hybrid working environments and work/life balance
• Meaningful feedback in real-time that empowers them to do things as effectively as possible in line with their managers’ expectations
• Emotional intelligence training, so they can lead with empathy, compassion and effectiveness
• Working within organizations that are genuinely diverse and inclusive
• Clarity surrounding expectations and how best to make key decisions

How Do You Identify Next Generation Leaders?

Watch what people already do when nobody asked them to. The one who pulls a stalled project forward, names the risk the room is avoiding, and coaches a peer off the org chart is showing you the behavior you need in the next seat. A performance rating will not show you that. Real stakes will.

So put the stakes in front of them. Give three or four of your strongest candidates a 90-day project with a real target, a real budget, and a senior sponsor who sits in on every review. Ninety days later you are not guessing about the bench. You have a short list, and you have readiness evidence your board can read.

Learn2 built that design for American Express as the Million Dollar Leadership Program, and it returned more than $1M per cohort. It runs today as Orchestrate Impact: your high potentials work a live business problem while senior leaders create the next generation inside the business, and you watch who leads.

Before you pick the three or four, find out how each of them already leads. See how your emerging leaders naturally lead — free, 5 minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do leadership development programs work?

Most do not, and the reason is consistent. Most leadership development is slides and a classroom. People leave with notes, and the behaviour at work stays exactly the same. What works is a leader learning something and then applying it in context, which is contextual application, and then the part that matters most: transfer. Transfer into the environment where you actually want the leadership. The business meetings. The team meetings. The client conversations. That is why immersion in the business is the surest way to change leadership behaviour.

Why do leadership development programs fail?

They fail at transfer. A classroom can hand a leader a model, and the model stays in the classroom. The behaviour you are paying for lives somewhere else, in the business meeting, the team meeting, and the client conversation, and nothing in a slide deck moves it there. Programs that change behaviour put leaders into an immersion, have them apply what they learn in the real context, and then carry it into the meetings where the leadership is actually needed.