Q: What is leadership development? 

"Leadership development is the collective efforts of everyone in the organization to grow people, managers with the purpose of growing the business and retaining people."

It’s complex because many actors play the part in that process. Sometimes it is only L&D but that isn’t the whole picture.

Leadership development involve four actors:

1. The leader: the person who needs to grow, to learn.

2. People managers & senior leaders: they’re important because they are like a “sounding board” that constantly is giving feedback to the leader. Senior leaders can serve as role models.

3. The team of the leader: they can give the leader feedback about their needs and their training.

4. The L&D team: they provide the content and resources for the leader to learn from. They make sure the environment the leader is in is effective for growth.

Q: What are the benefits of a leadership development program? What companies benefit from it?

A: It depends on the size of the company. Startups in high growth usually do not have problems with retention, but it is better to prepare your managers to manage more people when the company is small to see payoff in the long term. For the bigger companies the retention might be the problem so people managers and leaders have to be prepared to grow their team. 

On average, highly rated managers are 2.2x more likely to retain their employees than lower rated managers.

Q: Is there a minimum company size to start leadership development?

A: There is no minimum. The budget and resources will differ but leadership development is important from the first steps in the company. The simplest way of growing your leader is hiring a coach. 

“Some startups struggling with is that the company grows faster than their co-founders and their co-founders can become bottlenecks in the growth of the company”

Q: How would a company start a leadership development program tomorrow?

A: First part of any project is research, so start by asking questions like:

• Why are we doing this?

• What result are we expecting?

Next is external research, google for behaviors of good leaders.

Think about what characteristics your ideal leader should have.

Lavinia isn't a fan of training, and instead recommends social learning especially for small startups.

Next, figure out how to measure the effects of leadership development program.

Resources to help:

• https://hbr.org/2017/02/how-spotify-balances-employee-autonomy-and-accountability 

• https://hrblog.spotify.com/2020/04/21/leading-the-band/ 

• https://research.google/ 

• https://www.humu.com/ 

“Because at the end of the day, what you see out of the skills and knowledge a leader has is their behaviors and habits”

Q: What skills do scale up managers need to focus on?

A: There are four important skills:

1. Understanding the market and the product

2. Self awareness 

3. Coaching

4. Facilitation it's a huge help for team development