Executive Development, What is it?

Exec­u­tive devel­op­ment is a topic that’s usu­ally quite high on a board’s agenda. It’s the prac­tice of devel­op­ing the organ­i­sa­tions exec­u­tive man­age­ment employ­ees, through a vari­ety of methods.

So, what is devel­op­ment? Well, per­haps it’s eas­ier to first explain what it it isn’t. Devel­op­ment isn’t arrang­ing a train­ing course or two, and hop­ing every­thing just works out. It’s much more in depth, and takes a longer term view at what an indi­vid­ual exec­u­tive requires in terms of their per­sonal and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment, in order to meet the organ­i­sa­tions needs.

There are some great exam­ples of exec­u­tive devel­op­ment around (GE and their Cro­tonville facil­ity comes to mind). At Cro­tonville, GE oper­ate the “Jack F. Welch Lead­er­ship Devel­op­ment Cen­ter”, util­is­ing struc­tured, col­lab­o­ra­tive and inno­v­a­tive meth­ods to develop their world­wide exec­u­tive ranks. Other organ­i­sa­tions are not so lucky, par­tic­u­larly small firms. I am sure you can think of your own examples.

A cost effec­tive way for small firms to develop their exec­u­tive man­age­ment staff is through exec­u­tive coach­ing. This elim­i­nates the cap­i­tal expen­di­ture asso­ci­ated with pro­grams such as those con­ducted by GE and others.

What many peo­ple don’t know is that exec­u­tive devel­op­ment can also include the devel­op­ment of those staff  that will be exec­u­tive mange­ment staff in the future. This is a big aspect of pro­grams such as those con­ducted at Cro­tonville. They don’t include only cur­rent exec­u­tive staff. They con­sider who is likely to suc­ceed cur­rent staff, and tai­lor devel­op­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties accordingly.