It does not matter what you call it or how you define it, solving the ongoing challenge of leadership capability remains the Holy Grail in business. Organizations will do what it takes to attract, develop and retain those people who possess the full package-top performance and personality. Yet, there is an inherent concern that an organization is never quite sure it has the right people, has the ability to recruit them or has the potential to develop its own.

The Busisiness Envivironment
Where do training, learning and development fit in? Let's look at our business environments. These elements have changed significantly over the past decade and will continue to do so at an ever-increasing pace. Business leadership today is about "doing the right things right." When leaders succeed in doing the right things, the measures of business success inevitably follow. Talented people are a prime ingredient of this success; in fact, the survival of organizations depends upon them.

The days of standard processes and systems are gone-when change initiatives occurred every so often and an organization placed customers at the forefront of everything it did. Now we have technology-driven environments where products and services are out of date within months, not years, and where competition is increasingly fierce. Organizations are obsessed with being the first to market with new products, marketing initiatives, brands and delivery channels. The leadership role now embraces both internal and external customers and has to work across different functions to make things happen, all at breakneck speed and efficiency.

Change is now a constant way of life. Responsiveness, focus and quality are the watchwords of high performance organizations and the leaders within them. Change is demanding on leadership because it applies pressure to the management of people, processes and systems. As a leader attains greater levels of responsibility and span of control, increased levels of complexity should be managed in terms of wider collaborative activity. This includes not only managing people who may not be based in the traditional office surroundings, but also suppliers, consultants and partnership arrangements. The emphasis for the leader is to ensure that both people and resources add value as the stakes become higher.
Thehe Role of Traiaining
Given that the leadership role is now more results oriented, more demanding and more complex than ever before, can training and development respond to meet these needs? Currently, leadership ranks second behind quality as the most popular training area. If the significant investment spent on leadership training programs is any indication, the impact of training and development is crucial. There is a buoyant marketplace with a vast array of suppliers offering specific skills training, which includes service management, interviewing, coaching, the management of performance issues and continuous improvement.

Professional suppliers will ensure that the training methods used are practical, relevant and easy to incorporate in the real world, but it is important to determine the following:

1. How does training help leaders in the present and future to deal with the increasing ambiguity and complexity in their leadership role? How trainable is this area after all? Is the area better developed through role experience, focused support and mentoring?

2. What behavioral focus does the training provide? What research has been completed to ensure that the behaviors being developed are proven to improve business results?

3. How does the training help leaders make the link between results they need to deliver and how they are going to deliver them?

Successful leaders are those who understand both what they need to do to be successful-the result-and how they need to behave to achieve success-the application of their core competencies, knowledge and personal characteristics. Having an enjoyable training experience is important, but the bottom line must revolve around how the learning experience is going to affect the organization's results. Training must be results oriented and include a focused follow-up activity and evaluation procedure to ensure that human resources departments are able to prove the return on investment (ROI) that the organization expects from the intervention. Consequently, the leadership dilemma is that the situation is too complex for there to be a simple one-off solution.

The Role of Development
So what about development? Based on extensive experience working with organizations to identify development solutions and analyze previous research on the subject, two clear themes emerge:

• Effective leadership development tends to revolve around non-trained activities, and as a result takes time.

• Experience in different roles is critical to effective development as it provides different contexts and situations within
which to apply new learning and training techniques

The most effective forms of development revolve around the following (indicated in order of effectiveness) and show that the key to effectiveness is ensuring that leadership development activity is results oriented:

Figure 1: Development Activities

It is important to have a performance or competency framework against which to improve. The development of competency and performance models through the identification of researched behavioral clusters or competencies and personal characteristics (via psychometrics) have been subject to significant performance rigor and are more likely to relate to improving business performance. These take time and cannot be cobbled together-a feature of many organizations that believe a shopping list of behaviors and value-based statements can help identify the future talent and leaders of tomorrow.

Leadership Experience
A leader should create the climate for learning and development and be able to show others what to do and how to get there. The key is that the team learns from the experience so that the individuals may be able to apply the same capabilities in other, more complex scenarios because every environment is different.

You may have an individual team manager (Level 2) who effectively manages people. This team has a diverse range of processes and associated outputs to deliver to customers. Although the team manager is successful, you should not assume that those same capabilities could be applied to a unit manager role (Level 4). The focus is different and this is a significant risk. This risk is commonly taken by organizations on the basis that past performance predicts future performance. This is still a sound basis to work from, but when reviewing the Leadership Experience Continuum (see Figure 2), it is not as simple.

The wider the jump in leadership experience:

• The more certain you need to be that the individual has undertaken a rigorous development program
in order to compensate for an apparent lack of experience.

Figure 2: Leadership Experience Continuum

• The greater the level of development support that will need to be available to individuals in their new leadership role (this assumes that the individual's ego allows them to acknowledge that they may not be the finished article
from day one).

• The greater the risk in moving that individual to that level.

This is not to say that these risks shouldn't be taken, because in the real world, theory and pragmatism need to be balanced, but this type of issue may influence the success or failure of leaders. It may not be the individual's fault because they didn't meet expectations. Trainingand development can help to generate the right behavior, but focus needs to be on reinforcing what you want people to do and ensuring that you have the organizational systems in place to sustain it.

The Way Forward
The challenges for attracting, developing and retaining leaders of tomorrow have not changed. It is simply that things are moving faster than ever before and any gaps in capability become evident more quickly. It is not just about learning knowledge and skills; it is a far more multifaceted approach. Dealing with the demands that are made on the leaders of tomorrow is just as important as developing the following:

• Individuals' self-awareness, which is critical for successful leaders

• Business, strategic and commercial knowledge

• Leadership styles via psychometric assessments

• Behaviors that drive successful performance

• Organizational and product-specific knowledge where necessary

It is about enabling leaders to deal with the complexity of leadership roles that have emerged and handling those unforeseen challenges that affect different parts of an organization. Leaders need to inspire others to achieve and to grow as quickly as their environments and responsibilities demand. However, it is essential to remember that being in a leadership role can be lonely and frustrating and you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad. No amount of training or development can prepare someone for every issue that may arise.