How to develop future-ready talent – fast

Start with the business strategy: dual transformation

The first step is to identify which skills are needed to keep ‘performing’ or improving the core existing business while ‘transforming’ by identifying and developing opportunities for creating new revenue streams. This is known as ‘dual transformation.’

CEOs who excel here tend to exhibit optimization and transformation behaviors across all aspects of leadership (strategy, execution, leading people and teams, leading stakeholders, and leading self).

Innovate in talent assessment

The application of new technology, including game-based assessments and the application of GenAI to assessments, can produce a better candidate experience and richer insights into leadership performance and potential, serving as the basis for progression planning and career development.

New technology offers greater precision and deeper insight for three reasons:

• It enables the collection of many more data points, which provide richer insights into key targets of interest.
• It enables data collection of variables that are more dynamic and interdependent.
• It collects better quality data, both because of the more engaging methods used and because people engage with these methods in a more natural and relaxed way.

Progress rather than promote

An important element of the development process is that candidates are ‘progressed’ rather than succeeding someone, which implies promotion.

Progression also gives flexibility for the candidate to be developed in different dimensions, rather than only in a linear direction (promotion).

This widens the range of possibilities for development to ensure sufficient breadth of experience, which research has shown to be directly correlated with leaders’ propensity to deploy both optimization and transformation behaviors.