There are many issues that SDG International addresses with Executives and their teams to enable them to achieve their best performance.  One of the more critical issues for businesses today is effective Leadership.

Every year countless businesses that appear to have all the right stuff—great vision and the operational capabilities to implement it—fail. Why? The answer is simple: They fail because they don’t have good leaders.

Great leaders maintain competitive preeminence and help companies capitalize on the opportunities the future will bring. Their responsibilities in today’s business environment seem daunting. They must create vision and direction, organize operations so that the vision is profitably attainable, inspire and retain their workforces, and develop tomorrow’s leaders. The full cost of a leadership void at the senior level can’t be ignored: reduced productivity, added training costs, lost knowledge and sales—plus the cost of replacement, an estimated 150% of an employee’s compensation package—can dramatically affect any company’s bottom line.

Using conventional leadership development tools, we have not always been able to develop potential leaders into great leaders. However, information that enables us to bridge this gap is now available. We know that (1) leadership can be tricky to define across all situations, but organizations must go through the exercise of identifying and prioritizing what is important for their leadership team to excel; (2) effective leaders combine natural talent, subject matter expertise, and the ability to adapt and learn; and (3) processes and tools exist that can incrementally and significantly improve performance.

Clearly, while analysis of revenues, profit margins, price per share and operational costs remain essential, they are not the only indicators of success. The quality of leadership must also be assessed. In today’s environment, no business should be without data and processes that identify the strengths and challenges of its leaders, or without the processes that help to develop the skill sets of those leaders.

America’s most winning companies invest heavily in leadership: Recent estimates suggest that corporate America spends more than $10 billion every year on leadership training. Leadership is clearly a corporate priority. Creating and maintaining good leadership can and should become a measurable, operational process, just like reporting profit and loss every quarter.