Strengths and Weaknesses of Leadership Development - Case Study Example

For effective leadership development, each company should implement the following factors: careful evaluation, a suitable audience, proper infrastructure, an efficacious learning system, and a relevant rewarding system (Leskiw & Singh 2007). Leadership strategy helps define how many leaders the company needs, where they should be allocated, what professional skills must be developed, and what perspective directions the company’s performance should take (Pasmore 2009).

According to Collins (2004, p. 241), “up-front analysis is the key to making sure that the interventions target the right skills to positively impact organizational performance”. Therefore, a new vice president for human resources at Federated Industries, Patricia Paterson, has arranged a meeting with the personnel directors of all subsidiaries, which helped identify the advantages and drawbacks of implemented leadership strategies. Hence, it has been concluded that the biggest weakness of the engineering company is the fact that due to the absence of particular employees to arrange management training the subsidiary provides only technical training, which can not be enough for proper leadership development.

The company practices external management training. An employee who is interested in promotion needs to make a request for specific seminars and only in case a manager approves it, a worker can be sent to the training. It means that the company does not create any stimulus and encouragement for employees, on the contrary, the staff should consider and plan their development by themselves, which may happen not often. The staff is a dynamic structure that requires constant improvement and the company’s obligation is to create motivational factors and proper conditions for encouraging further development.

If the company fails to do this, the collective may stay stagnant, which does not benefit the company’s performance. The strong aspect of the engineering subsidiary is that the company pays partially for the MBA courses that some of the employees take. This is a good motivational factor. However, taking into account that in most cases after finishing their studying, these employees accept job offers from other companies, it is fair to conclude that Federated Industries does not provide sufficient opportunities for promotions and growth.

The second subsidiary provides personal coaching, developmental assignments, and cross-functional projects for the employees that have been chosen by the managers. Compared to the engineering company, the subsidiary that produces consumer goods focuses more on leadership development instead of the leader approach. However, the major weakness of its policy is that all the rest employees except for the small part that has been chosen by managers do not receive any developmental opportunities within the company.

The electronics company offers monthly seminars and external consultations several times a year for the six most talented managers. These employees are the main candidates for promotion; therefore, they are highly motivated. However, other employees may be underestimated due to the executives’ preferences and conflicts regarding their protégés. It may take a lot of time until one of the chosen managers gets a promotion and another worker is selected to take a vacant place of a candidate. 

For the engineering company, it is suggested to provide external coaching. Despite its expense, this method will help in encouraging the staff to improve their skills and saving those workers who care about development and start to search for it in other companies. In addition, the company should review its motivation policy and promotion offers for employees who finish their MBA courses to eliminate the leakage of valuable personnel. The subsidiary of consumer goods must implement diversified job assignments for those workers who are not chosen for personal coaching.

For the electronics company, it is recommended to provide networks that will improve relations between functional areas and diminish conflicts between executives regarding the choice of the best managers because they will be able to evaluate the performance of different workers from other divisions. Project-based learning experiences and manager-facilitated workshops may be of great help to each of the subsidiaries (Groves 2007).