Building a Leadership Pipeline with the Work Personality Index®

Employees wanted more leadership development opportunities, and the City required more leaders in the pipeline. The Work Personality Index helped answer the leadership succession question human resources was asking: “How do we find those people, develop them, and prepare them?”

Despite having talented people across the organization, employees with leadership potential were not always visible.

“Some people had imposter syndrome and didn't see themselves as leadership material, or they simply hadn't been provided the opportunity to develop the skills to take that next step,” explained Bobbi Chamberlain, CHRO for the City of Grande Prairie. The city needed to consider two important questions:

1. Do we have the leadership capacity we need today?
2. Are we proactively building the leadership capacity we will need tomorrow?

To address these challenges, the City's Human Resources department developed the Municipal Leadership Academy (MLA), a program designed to identify, develop, and prepare employees for future leadership opportunities.

A leadership development program was needed for three reasons:

1. Building Leadership Capacity: Employee survey feedback identified a leadership gap. Employees were asking for more leadership development and stronger leadership capability.
2. Internal Mobility: Challenges with internal mobility and lacked a clear pathway for talent to move into leadership roles. Some employees had the experience, some had potential, and others simply needed someone to say, “I see something in you.”
3. Workforce Stability: Leadership changes and vacancies can create a ripple effect across an organization. When employees are not prepared to step into these roles, vacancies can disrupt teams, employees, and the organization as a whole.

Leadership development wasn't simply about professional development. It was about growing our people, building our leadership bench and creating greater stability in our workforce,” explained Chamberlain. Those factors became the foundation for the Municipal Leadership Academy.

Identifying Employees with Leadership Potential

When selecting participants for the Municipal Leadership Academy, the City's HR department was not simply looking for employees with the longest tenure or those who were already managers. They wanted to understand who had the potential to lead.

To identify employees with leadership potential, the City developed a formal application process that included three steps:

1. An expression of interest: employees submitted a resume and cover letter explaining why they were interested in the leadership academy, including which skills they wanted to develop and how they saw the opportunity fitting into their future with the City.
2. Committee evaluation: A committee reviewed employees' performance, willingness to learn and contribute beyond their immediate roles, curiosity, and initiative in seeking new opportunities and challenges.
3. Work Personality Index^® (WPI): The City used the WPI alongside the application and committee evaluation to gain insight into employees' workplace personality traits and help identify leadership potential. Could they engage people? Collaborate with others? Demonstrate stewardship of public resources? Take initiative and see opportunities where others saw problems? And perhaps most importantly, could they bring people with them? These insights supported the City's consideration of its Guiding Beliefs and corporate values when selecting participants.

Developing Future Leaders With WPI and Team Dynamics

Being selected for the Municipal Leadership Academy was just the beginning. Participants were expected to commit time and effort to developing their leadership skills and putting what they learned into practice.

“Leadership development takes time. It takes practice. It takes reflection. It takes feedback, and frankly, it takes a willingness to be uncomfortable. We were asking people to step outside their day-to-day roles, challenge how they saw themselves, learn from others and put that learning into practice,” described Chamberlain.

To build leadership self-awareness, the City used results from the Work Personality Index (WPI) and Team Dynamics to help participants understand their personal strengths, challenges and areas for growth.

The WPI sessions led by Thomas Slifka, a Senior HR Consultant at the time and MLA program architect, highlighted how individual style influenced the approach to communication, leading change initiatives, constructive conflict and ultimately impacted their leadership. With these assessment insights, participants could clearly see a personal development path to improve performance.

How do you measure leadership program success?

The success of a leadership development program goes beyond completing training. For the City of Grande Prairie, the goal of the Municipal Leadership Academy was to build a stronger leadership pipeline and prepare employees to take on greater responsibilities.

The City identified several important questions to help evaluate the program's long-term success:

• Are people successfully moving into roles with greater leadership responsibility?
• Is there stronger internal mobility and are employees seeing a future for themselves within the organization?
• Does the city have a more stable leadership bench? Is succession capacity being built so that people are developed and prepared before a vacancy occurs, rather than scrambling to fill gaps?

The program goal was to create a leadership pipeline, and in a municipal organization, that matters because city residents don't experience organizational charts. They don't see vacancies or know who is sitting in which leadership position. Residents experience the services that are delivered and when municipality invests in leadership capacity it is ultimately investing in the ability to keep delivering those services, consistently, effectively and into the future.

For Chamberlain, the Municipal Leadership Academy represents something bigger than a leadership program:

“It represents a commitment to our people and to the future of our organization. We knew we had talent. Our employees were telling us they wanted development, we could see that internal mobility needed attention, and we knew that strengthening our leadership bench could create greater workforce stability."

Rather than waiting for leadership vacancies to reveal gaps, the City took a proactive approach to developing its future leaders:

“This became the philosophy behind the program: find the talent, develop the talent, create the opportunity, and then have those leaders help develop the next generation.”