Sure, it's about feeling nurtured and appreciated for employees, but experts also say that when employees feel like they're not growing any more in their job, they get irritated and their quality of work suffers.
Dig Deeper: Should Job Promotions be Random?
Creating a Leadership Development Program: Use Real-World Examples
A leadership development program is only as good as its practical applications.
Disney doesn't just tell its employees about customer service values established in the 1960s; it gathers good customer service stories from around the company to share with its leadership classes, and takes employees backstage at its parks to see its complex support environment. When on the road doing classes for outside organizations, instructors create a virtual experience using film and photographs.
"We want those case studies to be as current as possible, as relevant as possible," Jones says. "We're always careful to make sure what we're talking about is not just baked in historical context." Disney treats itself as a living laboratory to see what approaches work, and shares those successes in its classes.
Businesses should also pick instructors for the program who have a track record of good leadership. Otherwise, employees won't embrace the message.
"Leadership is as much performance art as much as it is everything else," Murphy says. "They can talk a good game, but if they go out into the real world and an employee starts talking to them and they roll their eyes, well, they haven't learned much."
Even in a struggling business, some pockets of the organization are usually still doing well, leadership instructors say. Staff development allows organizations to extrapolate lessons from those pockets to the whole company.
Dig Deeper: What They Do (and Don't) Teach You in Business School
Creating a Leadership Development Program: Leading in a Global Economy
Remember when a manager was someone who worked in an office with 20 employees sitting outside the door? In today's world of a global workforce, virtual offices and digital conferencing, managers may have employees they don't see for months at a time. How can you still develop leaders for a decentralized workforce?
Experts say this challenge means you have to train leaders to be more purposeful in establishing personal relationships with staff.
"Developing relationships with people is sort of the first step to developing enough trust with someone so they will willingly invest in your leadership," says Daniel of PDI Ninth House. That means being able to pick up the phone every now and then instead of just relying on what some experts call a "concurrent monologue" of e-mail.
"There's nothing harder than to develop a relationship with someone than when you're only communicating with shorthand and e-mail," Daniel says.
Part of the challenge of leading in a digital world is the need to be more clear and direct in your conversations with employees, Scharlatt says.
"Communications have to be clearer, more helpful, more on target," he says. Leadership programs in a decentralized workspace should also has focus on the value of sharing information and transparency through social media and virtual office sharing systems, Murphy says.
Dig Deeper: Working With a Global Workforce
Creating a Leadership Development Program: Additional Resources
The Disney Institute offers public workshops and customizable private leadership development classes at its Walt Disney Resorts, in addition to classes in New York, Washington D.C. and other cities around the world.
Leadership IQ offers live programs, teleconferences and webinars in addition to researching and producing white papers about workforce productivity trends.
The Center for Creative Leadership offers a variety of leadership programs along with other materials to facilitate in-house staff development.
PDI Ninth House, based in Minneapolis, offers development assets, executive coaching and e-learning and other customizable packages
TrainingIndustry.com ranks the best leadership programs in the country.
