In Part 1, we showed how your current leaders are an essential asset in filling your leadership pipeline. We also introduced the Five Critical Capabilities needed by current leaders to develop upcoming leaders. In Part 2, using a real case study, we took a deeper dive into those Five Critical Capabilities: strategic talent mindset, talent identification skill, creating development opportunities, coaching skills, and interpersonal awareness.

Here, in Part 3, we discuss how to ensure the health and strength of your pipeline, by answering three questions:

1. What is the status of your leadership pipeline?
2. Is senior leadership aligned and bought in?
3. Are key organizational levers aligned to create a culture that accelerates leadership development?

From our quarter-century experience in consulting with HR executives to help their leaders, here are the important things to consider in each question.

In Part 1 of our series, we explained that your company’s long-term strategic advantage relies on current leaders to develop future leadership talent. We identified Five Critical Capabilities that leaders must demonstrate: strategic talent mindset, talent identification skills, creating development opportunities, coaching skills, and interpersonal awareness.

Here, in Part 2, we present the remarkable story of how one HR executive leveraged those five talent-development capabilities with leaders to expand their severely restricted leadership pipeline.

Your company’s long-term strategic advantage relies on strong leadership to align people, execute strategy, clearly define the culture, and engage all employees. But as Baby Boomer leaders rapidly retire, most of their collective leadership experience — often 30 to 40 years’ worth — is out the door.

It’s not easy being a Regional Director in a pharmaceutical sales organization. There is a lot of pressure that comes along with the role.

After all, regional directors (RDs) are frequently being pulled in different directions, trying to satisfy corporate initiatives while also catering to the unique demands of their own districts. They are initiators as well as implementers, expected to translate strategy into its most tangible form in the field. Often this leads to an unfortunate series of misalignments, miscommunications, and misdirection.

So what then can be done to ensure strong and consistent regional director performance in pharmaceutical sales?

Change leadership is critical to your pharmaceutical sales results because of the acceleration of change in today’s pharmaceutical sales organizations. Change has evolved over the years from leaders just managing the change to leaders needing a full set of change skills and capabilities.

Change is no longer an event; it is a constant for organizations, and pharmaceutical sales representatives are looking to their leaders to help them navigate the flurry of change and to understand how to harness it to produce profitable performance.

In today’s environment, companies are heavily engaged with multiple, constant, concurrent and rapid changes impacting their pharmaceutical sales force.

Pharmaceutical sales leaders who are known to get results know there are critical leadership behaviors that¬¬ improve their ability to excel in their role. These leaders understand that strong sales performance is correlated with sales leaders engaging with their organization and the teams they lead in the right way at the right time.

Here are five critical leadership behaviors exhibited by successful pharmaceutical sales leaders.

Your goal is to be on the same page – to achieve and sustain true business alignment. However, it’s common for pharmaceutical sales organizations to roll out strategic and thoughtful initiatives that get off course soon after they are launched. Without team alignment, you’ll immediately start to see frustration and conflict between sales teams that need each other, and flatlined results for your organization.

Many companies boast about their cultures of innovation. They incorporate creativity and openness into their mission or values statements. They reward employees for new insights and ideas. They hire and promote for innovation. Yet despite such measures, they find that their teams remain stubbornly locked in place, struggling to generate new ideas and to execute even minor change initiatives.

Is your company stormproof?

The storm I’m talking about isn’t a tornado or hurricane, but rather a “perfect storm” in the battle for talent. A tightening labor market combined with baby boomer retirements is adding up to significant talent gaps at many companies. Younger workers are often not ready to take over in leadership positions. Meanwhile, they are becoming frustrated with perceived shortfalls in the leadership development opportunities available at many companies.

Have you heard about Adobe’s Kickbox? It’s a little red box filled with materials that take employees through a six-step, self-guided innovation process. Employees who have a new idea they want to pursue take a workshop and then proceed through the stages of innovation on their own. Each box contains a credit card with $1000 in seed money.