Week 4 - Leadership Training as a Human Resource Function?

Leadership development should be supported by the Human Resources department, however, it should be led by direct management personelle. When developing a leadership plan for employees, the HR department should lead the development of the plan and the implementation. The HR department should confer with both lower management and upper management to develop a plan that works and fits with the goals of the company before giving the finalized plan to management personelle who will be developing their employees into leaders.

Once the plan is finalized, it should then be turned over to management to implement. At this point, HR should become a supporting role, there to help either management or the employee trainees with whatever issues may arise. This will allow management to develop their leaders to their specific roles, while also freeing up HR to work on other issues within the department. However, HR should be the department leading performance and program reviews to make sure the leadership programs are being followed properly.

If you look at how the HR department would run if this were the department to completely run the leadership training and development programs, I believe it would weight down the department. The key here, once the program is in place and agreed upon by HR, upper and lower management, is to delegate the jobs for the development of leaders. HR should then do periodic reviews - quarterly or bi-yearly - to make sure that both management and trainees are meeting expected outcomes of the training. These reviews will let HR know that these programs are either being followed and are successful, or if they need to be altered in some way.