For several years, we have been seeing in the headlines that a leadership shortage is on the horizon. We have a tremendous opportunity to be proactive and fill our talent pool with leadership high potentials, but are we doing everything we can to prepare for this talent drought?

Let’s start with the facts… here are some important statistics from Deloitte to consider:

• An estimated 10,000 baby boomers retire every day and that millennials will make up almost 50% of the workforce by 2020.
• Over 65% of millennials are looking for a new job and a majority of them don’t plan on staying at their job for more than 3 years.
• 84% of organizations think a shortfall of leadership is underway.
• 85% of executives are not confident in their leadership pipelines

In addition, Forbes recently reported that millennials will makeup 75% of the workforce by 2025. There are not enough Gen-Xers to fill this gap, so the time to act and prepare our future “millennial” leaders is now. After reading these statistics, I think we can all agree that it seems like millennials may be the most studied generation in history.

If we act now and put a strategic plan in place to recruit, retain and develop our future leaders, we’ll set up our organizations for future success.

Here are a few ways we can prepare and make talent a strategic priority:

• Determine where your performance and leadership gaps are:

The first step in this process is to revisit your objectives and desired outcomes. Are they clearly defined with your current leadership team? If not, create redefined initiatives and communicate them with your company stakeholders.

The second step is to evaluate performance and diagnose the areas in your business that needs improvement. Highlight those areas and identify what the underlying cause is for under performance. Perhaps recruiting and some additional training is needed to improve performance.

• Identify your high potentials and millennials to develop:

A recent study by LinkedIn Learning stated that “a substantial 66 percent of companies say they’re ‘weak’ in developing millennial leaders. At the same time, employees describe opportunities to develop their own leadership skills as their No. 1 reason for staying with an organization.”

With that said, investing in a training program to develop future leaders not only will prepare you with your succession plan but will also help with retaining your high potentials.

• Implement your talent strategic plan:

Once you identify the “who” to develop, next you have to implement an effective way to carry out your strategic plan.

Let’s start with these few questions: Do you have someone internally that you can dedicate to training and development or will you need to outsource? You will also need to determine a budget for recruitment and development.

Get creative with your plan! Make it an incentive and create a “Talent Review Team” that is determined by engagement and performance of your employees. Perhaps developing a millennial mentorship program would be an effective way to carry out your plan.

Key Takeaway:  Millennials are our next generation of employees who will be generating company revenue ,so it’s very important that companies work towards attracting, retaining and developing the right talent.

We would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on this highly recognized topic! Please email me to discuss:  nancy@mchenryconsulting.net.