Thought Leader: How can we support future leaders to develop at pace?

Which support systems help accelerated leaders to develop with minimal personal or professional risk? Occupational therapist Dr Ines Wichert, managing director at Talupp, provides some advice.

Leaders need development, but for those who are on an accelerated track (requiring them to move continuously out of their comfort zone and progress at pace) development can bring risks in the form of personal pressure and burnout.

At the same time, there is a risk to the organisation of costly business mistakes. To guard against such derailment, businesses support their fast-track leaders through a range of social support systems; but what type of support is most effective?

We used in-depth interviews with business leaders to explore what works best; here we outline our findings and advice.

Different types of support

Let us first look at the types of support to which accelerated leaders need access. We broadly differentiate between four types of support:

Appraisal support
Informational support
Instrumental support
Emotional support

1. Appraisal support

Approval support, or the provision of feedback, is particularly powerful for helping emerging leaders to develop quickly. It is an important source of information that helps a person to increase their self-awareness and to understand their impact on others.

Emerging leaders who receive feedback are more likely to have greater self-awareness. Where this external reference point is not available, there may be a gulf between how emerging leaders see themselves and how others see them.

To enable access to appraisal support we can support fast track high-potential employees by providing:

regular one-to-one meetings for informal and timely feedback.
regular performance reviews which allow the employee to understand their overall performance and gauge the effectiveness of what they are doing.
access to self-assessment tools, such as personality profiling, to increase self-insights.
mobile technology that facilitates requesting and sharing instant feedback.

2. Informational support

Another important type of support is access to information and guidance. This can be technical information linked to a new role that a high-potential employee has taken on or more general career advice, such as information about available roles or insights into ‘unwritten rules’ for how to succeed in the organisation.

Our organisations can enhance access to informational support through a variety of processes, including:

regular networking events, ideally including people from all organisational levels and held during work hours. Access to the right contacts may be particularly important for women and people from minority ethnic backgrounds.]
career self-management information, such as individual career profiles, e-learning portals and information about promotion criteria and processes. This is particularly important for young career talent for whom career clarity is a core driver.
onboarding programmes which introduce a new starter to an organisation’s processes, values and culture thus helping to get the person up to speed faster.
an effective intranet and employee directory to help staff find the right people and locate experts within the organisation.

3. Instrumental support

To help ease the additional strain of starting a new role, practical support can make a big difference. In some instances, this support will be individually tailored. In other situations, it will be programmatic and formalised. To facilitate this, we can:

support with an employee’s relocation; for example, identifying local schools and language training.
provide coaching to address specific training needs.

4. Emotional support

Forging positive relationships at work can support career acceleration indirectly, boosting an emerging leader’s resilience and decreasing the risk of derailment through burnout. Systems that can help here are:

business resource groups that allow employees to meet like-minded people
office layouts that facilitate informal meetings and provisions to help remote workers to interact with colleagues.
wellbeing offerings.

Taking joint responsibility for employee wellbeing

By ensuring that accelerated high-potential employees have access to a range of support systems, we can help our future leaders navigate the challenges of an accelerated career track.

These systems and programmes provide a strong safety net and should be further supplemented with regular one-to-one conversations with managers or mentors, during which where any personal needs can be established, and tailored support can be provided.

Organisations and individuals must take joint responsivity for the wellbeing of their high-potential employees. Current leaders cannot abdicate their duty of care towards them by asking these people – however talented they may be – to manage the additional strain of accelerated leadership development on their own and exclusively through self-service of available support programmes.