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According to our latest survey of HR and L&D professionals, the top priority for 2025 is developing leadership skills in their organization.
This may be especially true in mid- to large-sized companies, where rapid growth may have caused developing leadership skills to take a spot on the back burner.
When you think about it, effective leadership is the core of every single successful business. It’s the underlying influence to factors like employee satisfaction and retention, productivity, and decision making processes, so it makes sense that developing leadership skills is a critical part of a company’s strategy.
In this post, we’ll explore what is leadership development, why developing leadership skills is so important to your organization, how to set leadership development goals, and how to apply what you’ve learned. Let’s get started.
What is leadership development?
Leadership development is a process that helps prepare employees to step into roles where they oversee and manage people, sometimes also referred to as part of the leadership pipeline. However, it also refers to the ongoing journey for current leaders to continue developing leadership skills that help them better motivate, guide, and support their teams. Leadership development weaves aspects of both personal and professional growth, equipping leaders with the hard and soft skills to guide their team towards success—whatever that looks like in their department.
Why leadership development is important
Effective leadership is the heartbeat of a successful organization since it impacts almost every facet of how your company operates. When leaders are well-developed and skilled, they shape a positive work and team culture that influences open communication, creativity and innovation, authenticity, and community within the organization.
Poor employee leadership development causes turnover
When companies don’t understand why leadership development is important, it often gets neglected. This can cause a ripple effect through the whole organization, affecting employee engagement, retention, and overall how well your company operates.
💡Poor management is the 3rd most predicted factor influencing turnover in 2025.
The phrase “employees don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses” is, unfortunately, true. 69% of employees of all ages would or have left their job due to a bad manager, but it’s higher amongst Gen Z (75%) and Millennials (77%). Whether it’s poor communication, micromanagement, or even neglectful or abusive behavior, employees are less likely than ever to tolerate a poorly trained or unsuitable leader.
💡Bad leadership led to more than $223 billion in turnover costs from 2014 to 2019.
Challenges and barriers to effective leadership development
Providing the right types or enough training to leaders sounds great on paper, but the reality is there are challenges and barriers to implementing it. Here are a few to keep in mind when planning your employee leadership development initiatives:
- Resource constraints: A lot of organizations can’t or won’t allocate resources to leadership training and it’s often because they don’t understand why leadership development is important to invest in.
- Finding the right people: It can be hard to truly judge who is a good candidate for leadership when you’re preoccupied with day-to-day responsibilities.
- Resistance to change: Both current leaders and potential leaders might resist new or renewed approaches to developing leadership skills, preferring their current way of doing things.
- Inconsistent executive support: For any initiative to be successful, buy-in from top leadership is necessary and if their support is inconsistent or weak, it’s a large barrier to overcome.
- Little experience to learn from: In developing leadership skills, mentors play a huge role in guiding and advising new and even seasoned leaders and helping them put what they learn into practice.
Benefits of leadership development
Leadership development programs have the potential to transform how your company operates—in a good way. Here are a few of the benefits of leadership development your company can realize:
- More engaged employees: When managers are committed to developing leadership skills, employees are better supported. After all, 70% of team engagement is determined by their leader.
- Better decision making: Equipped with leadership skills, managers are better prepared to make decisions that affect their team and their organization as a whole.
- Increased organizational flexibility: Well-trained and supported leaders are better at steering your company through change with confidence.
- Stronger team relationships: Developing leaders in the workplace builds more trust in teammates and the organization.
- Better succession planning: Employee leadership development creates a strong management pipeline and makes leadership succession planning far easier and less of a scramble when the time comes to fill a management position.
Now that you understand why leadership development is important and the benefits of leadership development, let’s get into what these initiatives may look like.
Developing leadership skills in the workplace
When it comes to guiding employees and developing leadership skills in the workplace, the Center for Creative Leadership highlights four core competencies to cultivate. And we’d like to add a fifth competency that connects all of these together.
- Self-awareness
- Communication
- Influence
- Learning agility
- Emotional intelligence
The importance of self-awareness in leadership
At the heart of strong leadership is a deep understanding of oneself. Creating exercises where leaders explore their strengths, weaknesses, values, and emotional triggers can help them navigate their reactions and behaviors more thoughtfully—improving their decision-making and building stronger relationships with their teams.
Communication is at the core of good leadership
Leadership is not just about sharing vision and giving direction; it’s about engaging a team. By helping leaders cultivate active listening skills and focusing on clear, back-and-forth communication, they can foster a culture of trust and collaboration.
Developing influence, not authority
A great leader can inspire and motivate others to get on board with their vision and work towards shared goals. Making sure your leaders understand the difference between authority and influence is key. Show them how to demonstrate credibility and authenticity while learning what drives and motivates their team.
Listen, learn, and grow
Leaders who demonstrate learning agility welcome feedback (from all sources), embrace change, and are committed to their personal and professional growth. Leading by example, developing a learning mindset can not only increase a leader’s effectiveness but also inspire their team to strive for greatness.
Improving emotional intelligence
Developing the capacity to recognize, understand, and manage one’s own emotions—as well as those of their team and peers—connects these core competencies. As humans, we’re emotional beings, and working on emotional intelligence builds an empathetic leader that’s capable of supporting and forging connections with their team.
Setting leadership development goals
As an HR or L&D professional, you understand the need to measure success of employee leadership development initiatives. Setting leadership development goals on the individual level, the team level, and the organizational level can help you measure how developing leadership skills is actively affecting your organization and how you can build on your approach.
At the individual level, leadership development goals could take the form of improving public speaking skills, improving team cohesion and collaboration, or practicing conflict resolution. At the team level, it could look like increasing team efficiency and productivity or how well they work with other teams. At the organizational level, you could measure overall employee satisfaction, retention factors, decision-making times, and outcomes.
Pro tip: One of your most valuable tools will be feedback. Whether it’s through a current or potential leader’s self assessment, speaking with team members, or discussing with upper management, creating several avenues for feedback helps you get an all-around view of program performance.
What role does a mentor play in leadership development?
When faced with uncharted territory, the best way to find your way is by learning from someone who’s experienced it before. This is why mentorship plays such a crucial role in developing leadership skills.
💡75% of executives credit mentorship for their success
When seasoned leaders share their experience and wisdom, it creates a relationship where the mentee feels comfortable sharing challenges and struggles so the mentor can help guide them. It can be advice on how to approach a certain situation or team dynamic, suggestions on which skills a leader should work on, or constructive feedback on missteps. Plus, the opportunity for internal knowledge transfer is incredibly valuable to your succession planning, making mentorship programs a valuable option when exploring employee leadership development.
How Together supports developing leadership skills
Incorporating technology into any learning and development initiative—not just employee leadership development—is a great way to implement these programs more quickly and sustainably with built-in measurement capabilities.
Together’s mentorship software, for example, helps you easily connect current or future leaders with more seasoned managers using our mentor match engine—all while tracking engagement and opening avenues for feedback. Together reduces the administrative load on you and your team, allowing you to focus more on nurturing stronger leadership in your organization.
See how Together can help support employee leadership development—book a demo with one of our experts today.
