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• Knowledge assessments -- Where appropriate, measurements
should be in place to ensure that the participants are absorbing the
information they need to absorb. After all, if they’re not absorbing it,

it is certain they won’t be sharing it and incorporating it into the
operation of the organization.
• Mentoring – As important as the above approaches to learning are, it
is a truism that “leadership is more caught than taught.” That is why
mentoring is so important. This can be facilitated via the two
following components:

1. The participants should team up with another leader within
the organization who is down the career path a little further
than they are.
2. As the leadership development program gets going, what
better way for leaders to continue to put into practice what

they’re learning than to have them mentor someone outside the
group who they perceive to have great leadership potential?
Leaders always should be looking for ways to produce and
invest in other potential leaders.
• Temporary assignments -- Top management can also use temporary
assignments as part of employee leadership development. It is most

often top management who gets the requests to assign one of his or
her employees to a special project or task force, who knows that
someone will need to fill in for an employee on temporary leave, or
who actually creates a temporary assignment in his or her group.
Certainly that manager wants to assign someone who has strengths

that match the requirements of the assignment, but he or she should
also think through who could benefit from the challenges embedded
in the assignment. Organizations can support this process by
requiring regular developmental planning conversations between
supervisors and employees; these conversations create space to think
more systematically about the kinds of experiences an individual
employee could benefit from and primes the boss to be on the look-

out for these opportunities.
• Posting leadership development opportunities -- Organizations can
also post opportunities on an internal “marketplace.” These postings
can include opportunities available for anyone in the organization,

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