Leaders are considered as most important asset for an organization. They set the direction and provide the reason for people to progress on the path shown by them. They base their thinking on what is important in the long-term and so their decisions have long lasting and pounding impact on the organization. The influence is not limited to performance at marketplace but spreads on to more critical elements of the business like culture, processes, and external relationships. It is an accepted fact today that in any organization leadership is the ultimate source of competitive advantage and in order to sustain this competitive advantage, an organization must provide thrust to leadership development. Great leaders create systems that encourage, reward and support developing leaders at all levels. In other words, in great companies leadership development is key management process. In such companies the focus is not merely on winning at marketplace alone, concerted efforts are on to produce winning leaders as well at every level in the organization, as it is these winning leaders that create and sustain winning organizations. It is found that in great organizations, there exists a structured process for developing future leaders but no two organizations have such an important process done the same way, in spite of the fact that objective of the process remains the same – sustainability. There is no copy book style of how leaders are developed in an organization, and the fact is that companies have their own way of doing it.

Great companies whether they have made it explicit or not have always focused on leadership as one of the key processes. We take a look at some of the companies that have gone about the challenging task, so that more and more companies can learn from these companies and put mechanisms to take care of this common organizational priority. No discussion on leadership development as a structured process is complete without the mention of GE, where “action learning” has been a way of working on real business issues during leadership development programs and “work outs” have become a way of generating challenging ideas. At Johnson & Johnson leadership development is considered an important business strategy. These are some companies where leadership process is considered a benchmark in the world today. Some other companies like Tata Steel of India have identified “Leadership” as their key enterprise process.

Leadership development must be a priority item on any organization’s agenda. Many organizations have developed leadership competency models to ensure that leaders at every level are developed on those critical competencies. Several organizations role modeled themselves in devising leadership models and using them to develop future leaders. The advantage with leadership models is that not only the competencies required of leaders are well articulated and communicated across the organization but also behaviours with respect to the desired competencies can be emphasized, assessed and developmental programs initiated. Some organizations have well defined policy of leaders mentoring and coaching the individuals in the team for which they are directly responsible. Job rotations are also part of leadership process by which leaders are exposed to different kind of organizational challenges. As they prepare themselves and their teams to meet the challenges they get the opportunity to enrich their experience, through which they draw important lessons for future.

The process of leadership development is so well developed in some of the great organizations that they have mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of the whole process. Multi source feedback systems like 360 degree feedback and leadership effectiveness surveys are some of the means through which the learning can be incorporated for overcoming the shortcomings. Such feedback mechanisms typically are customized with respect to critical leadership competencies identified by the company. Also performance results that these leaders achieve are reviewed by the senior managers or chief executive of the company. Sessions for reviewing progress and strategy formulation give an important opportunity for potential leaders to gain from the insights of current leaders.