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In the blog on assessing maturity levels you created a 3×3 matrix, to reveal the advanced and emerging leaders.

Set the right expectations before you invest in your leadership bench.

• Your advanced leaders will likely have fewer areas of improvement, but these likely will be deep rooted problems and difficult to diagnose and fix. Having seen success even with weaknesses, advanced leaders will be looking for a strong reason to change.
• Your emerging leaders will likely have lots of areas for improvement, but such people will likely be nervous, defensive, and not open to coaching.

Set objectives for “quantity” versus “quality” before you invest in developing your leadership bench. Advanced leaders may benefit from “coaching” and emerging leaders may benefit from “training.”

Have candid conversations with your talent about where you think they stand. You may find they do not agree or are surprised to hear the feedback. Be prepared to cut your losses rather than invest in leaders who are not ready to change.

In some cases, you may choose to have this candid conversation after the coaching or intervention, especially if you do not see any changes.

If the coaching or training is well designed, each leader will see and acknowledge reality and eliminate the need for you to have the candid conversation. In such cases, you should have the conversation anyway, to compare and contrast the “before” and “after,” and to praise and reinforce their transformation.

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To continue the plant analogy, if you want a nice garden, you have to ensure adequate sunlight, water, pesticides, and fertilizer for your plants.

Similarly, to develop your leaders, you need to review and adjust your incentives. Designing a proper incentive plan is an art and science in itself. Suffice to say, if you know the outcomes of your incentive plan, you can predict the behaviors much better than all the statements and slides used to describe your business strategy.

The key items to check are:

• Will the leadership training emphasize the right behaviors targeted by your incentives?
• Will the leaders face mixed messages from your incentives when they return to the workplace from a training session?
• Are there additional resources and capabilities needed to facilitate leadership behaviors? Sometimes training and incentives are not enough.

If you need to hire a compensation specialist, that is fine, but a good compensation specialist will ask you to articulate the above anyway.

By following this line of thinking, you are taking a systems approach to developing your leadership bench.