There’s no standard playbook or solution when it comes to people. It has to be personalized and tailored to your culture and your people. I can’t emphasize that enough, and HR leaders understand this better than anyone.
Investing in leadership development has long been a priority for organizations looking to build resilient and agile teams. Yet, as the workplace transforms, so too must our approaches to developing leaders who can thrive in dynamic, often unpredictable environments.
With global spending on leadership development programs exceeding $60 billion annually, many companies are questioning if they’re achieving real, lasting impact.
To dive deeper into these pressing challenges, we spoke with Malvika Jethmalani, an experienced CHRO with a rich, diverse career in building impactful leadership initiatives. Malvika shares her insights on the complexities of leadership development, especially in today’s remote and hybrid work settings.
Her experiences reveal how companies can overcome common pitfalls, leverage emerging trends, and build essential skills—like change management and continuous learning—that leaders need in the face of rapid change.
Q: How can companies tell if their current leadership development programs are hitting the mark or missing the point?
Malvika: My advice to leaders is always to define what results matter to you and what success looks like based on the needs and context of your business. This will vary for every company and every stage of growth.
For instance, if you’re a startup with 50 employees today and you scale to 500 employees in a couple of years, you’re still the same company, but what “good” looks like or the results you’re aiming for are likely going to change. This should happen because your business model, operating model, and culture are constantly evolving.
Before you even start designing these programs, it’s critical to start with the “why.” Why are you doing this? What business problem are you trying to solve?
The earlier you can tie the business outcome to your leadership development program, the more likely it is to succeed.
- For example, are you expanding into a new market and need managers to strengthen their change management skills?
- Or are you seeing a dip in employee productivity and need managers to improve in holding people accountable and providing tough feedback?
Defining the problem statement from the outset makes it much easier to measure success later on. If your problem statement is “We want managers to get better at providing actionable and timely feedback,” you can
- Roll out the program and then survey employees during performance cycles to assess whether they feel they’re receiving regular, timely, actionable feedback. You can track this trend over time.
- Another approach is to audit the performance feedback employees are receiving from managers, using a statistically significant sample and leveraging both AI and human insights to assess the quality of the feedback.
Finally, you can tie business metrics and overall performance to your leadership outcomes.
Q: What do you see as the most common missteps companies make and how can they avoid those?
Malvika: So a couple of them I already mentioned, such as not defining the problem you’re trying to solve and thinking of leadership development as just training.
Challenge: Blanket Approach for Leadership Development Programs
Another common mistake I see, especially in organizations with distributed workforces, is that they develop a program at headquarters and then roll it out in a blanket, generic way without accounting for local, regional, or country-level differences.
I think that’s a big miss because if you don’t understand the subcultures and microcultures within your organization, you won’t effectively engage your workforce. It’s not just about obvious cultural differences, like how business is done in China versus the US. Even within your organization, your London office likely has a different culture from your Singapore office, and understanding those nuances is critical.
Addressing this Challenge: One of my favorite ways to address this is to seek input from people in those microcultures and involve them in the development and implementation of the program. Early in my career, I developed a leadership program for employees in 14 countries. I made sure to seek input from local HR leaders and general managers in each country. When we rolled out the program, I also invited the general managers to facilitate parts of the sessions with me. This way, the participants saw their local leadership delivering the message, which made them more engaged and receptive.
If it had just been me, it probably would have been perceived as the HR person from headquarters (or the proverbial “ivory tower”) telling them how to be good leaders, and they wouldn’t have been as receptive.
Q: What’s been your approach when investing in leadership development needs to support critical business moments, like during mergers or restructuring?
Malvika: I’ve had a lot of experience in these situations, and my first instinct is to sit down with the CEO and the executive team, or at least a subset, to define what behaviors have worked thus far and gotten us to where we are today, and what behaviors we need to move forward in this next chapter. It’s about reinforcing that what got us here won’t take us there.
For example, if you’ve just been acquired, the behaviors that made your leaders successful up until the acquisition might have included being extremely nimble, working at a fast pace, being scrappy, and taking risks. Now, if you’ve been acquired by a larger organization, their risk tolerance might be different, and they might have more process rigor or discipline in place. Your leaders now need to adapt to this new environment.
It helps to use a “from-to” framework of leadership competencies.
For instance, we’re coming from an entrepreneurial stage, and the next stop is mindful growth. Once you define this, you can start identifying the specific skills your managers need to develop. Then, of course, you have your work cut out for you to help them grow.
Some leaders will accept the challenge and adapt, others might self-select out because things are changing in ways they didn’t sign up for, and some might need to be managed out. All of these outcomes are fine and normal during key inflection points like acquisitions, restructuring, or business transformations, as long as everyone is treated with dignity and respect.
To sum it up, in these situations, I always start by sitting down with the CEO and executive team to clarify where we’re coming from, where we’re going, and what leadership behaviors we need for the next chapter, and then we work on developing those.
Q: With the rise of remote work and distributed teams, how do you think leadership programs are going to evolve in the next few years?
Malvika: One company that does remote, virtual-first, or hybrid really well is Atlassian. They have a team dedicated to helping their leaders figure it out—not only training them but also providing the right tools. For example, how do you create connections in a remote or hybrid setting? When you bring people together, how do you ensure those meetings or off-sites are effective? How do you create a robust agenda? How do you define success in a meeting?
One common mistake organizations make when shifting to remote or hybrid is the volume of meetings skyrocket, which leads to burnout and stress. This happens because leaders haven’t been trained to run effective meetings or equipped with the skills to work asynchronously. They don’t understand the balance between synchronous and asynchronous work and how to get the most out of their people in these settings.
- So, first, put your best minds on this issue. It doesn’t need to be a dedicated team whose full-time job is figuring this out, but have a cross-functional team responsible for helping leaders be effective in a remote or hybrid world. This is new for many of us, and there’s no clear playbook for doing it well.
- Second, make sure you’re building rituals and routines and documenting them so they can scale.
- Third, when you bring people together, make sure you’re curating moments of collaboration and connection in a thoughtful, deliberate way—not just to check a box and say, “Okay, I had my quarterly team off-site, I’m done until next quarter.”
The way a company operates and communicates makes such a big difference, even when you’re in-office, but especially when communication is more asynchronous. It definitely impacts everything from Leadership Development to other HR initiatives—it needs to be adapted to the company culture. That’s the biggest thing I’ve seen.
When we’re working face-to-face in an office, I can see your expressions and body language. I might notice if you look tired or stressed and check in. But it’s harder to pick up on those cues online when we’re all in little Zoom boxes.
That’s why, in these settings, it’s more important than ever for leaders to check in with their teams, make sure they’re doing okay, and ask, “What obstacles are in your way? How can I support you better?” It’s also crucial to ask for upward feedback. In a remote or hybrid environment, getting to know the human first and the employee second is more important than ever.
There’s no standard playbook or solution when it comes to people. It has to be personalized and tailored to your culture and your people. I can’t emphasize that enough, and HR leaders understand this better than anyone.
Q: What new trends or tools have you seen emerging in leadership programs? While it’s a broad area, are there any specific innovations that stand out to you?
Malvika: One that I love, and it’s not just because I’m on their advisory board, is called Kindred Minds. It’s built right into Slack, where we already work. It’s integrated with your calendar and video calls, so it’s super easy to use. It also knows everything about you—your personality type, what you’re working on with your direct reports, and what you discuss during meetings.
You can feed your company’s manager toolkits or guides into Kindred Minds, and it knows your preferred coaching style. It gives real-time, AI-powered nudges on how to coach your team and provide quality, timely, and actionable feedback. It can even listen to your one-on-ones (with permission) and summarize them, offering feedback and coaching based on those discussions.
As HR professionals, we often want to roll out manager training, but CEOs say there’s no time. Even when training happens, it’s only effective about 25% of the time. With Kindred Minds, you get personalized, just-in-time coaching based on individual skill levels, and it provides nudges for how to improve next time. It’s like taking the expertise of an executive coach and scaling that expertise org-wide to all your leaders.
If you are an HR or People leader, and want to collaborate for an article – let’s chat!
