If you’re searching for the best candidates to lead your company, don’t look too far—you may be able to find them within the ecosystem of your business. Filling a role at any level can prove to be challenging, especially when you consider how tedious and time-consuming the recruiting process can be.

However, if you want trusted and proven individuals to lead your company, it will be worth your time to begin a leadership development training program.

Leaders cannot be manufactured; they need to be developed. This is so important, in fact, that 83% of businesses say it’s important to develop leaders at all levels. It could possibly take months for an outside hire to integrate within a business, so why not put forth the effort to develop your current employees into leaders? After all, they’re the backbone of your business.

There isn’t a perfect recipe for creating your leadership development training program, but there is a way to create a program that will be beneficial for your business and your employees.

Here are five tips for creating an effective leadership development training program.

Identify the Best Candidates Within Your Company

It’s important to understand that your next leader may not be your top producing salesperson—it may not even be your most tenured employee.

So, how do you find the top candidates?

First, you need to identify your organization’s goals and values to assess who has bought in to the culture that has been created. Once you’ve been able to break down your list of who might thrive in your leadership development training program, offer them a leadership skills assessment and a self-assessment.

By completing assessments, you will have a better understanding of where employees need to improve their skills, decision-making, and management style.

Development Needs to Be Approached with Many Methods

Your employees are different in many ways, so training should be customized for various learning styles and personalities. This doesn’t mean that each employee needs a unique program to follow, but it does mean that your leadership development training program needs to be growth-oriented.

Whether you provide e-learning opportunities, lectures, mentorship with high-level leaders, or real-world problems to solve, your employees must be taught in a number of methods.

Various methods of training can help leaders adapt. An overwhelming majority (86%) of organizations with formal leadership development programs responded rapidly to changing market conditions, whereas only 52% of companies with undeveloped and immature programs were able to accomplish the same.

Determine How You Will Measure the Program’s Success

If you want you leadership development training program to grow, you will need to find a way to judge its impact.

The growth of this program is imperative—older leaders will retire and you need to appease to younger generations joining your company. Approximately 63% of millennial employees say their leadership skills are not being fully developed and if they don’t believe they will experience upward growth, they will look for employment elsewhere.

Keep track of how many participants successfully complete the program and the number of promotions awarded through the program. Take these statistics and market them to your internal network.

Create a Sustainable Program

The key to your leadership development training program’s longevity is to maintain effective policies and procedures, and to adjust if it isn’t producing the results you expected.

Every participant of the program should have an equal opportunity to thrive. If your employees see that the program is constantly changing and being conducted differently for some participants, your participation is going to go down.  Establish clear goals for the participants and provide each of them the tools they need to successfully complete the program.

Try to avoid favoritism—individual training and access to technology shouldn’t be available to some, it should be available to all.

Tap Into Your Current Leaders

Who better to develop the future leaders of your company than its current leaders?

The current leaders of your business can best identify where there is need for improvement at the management level and how they believe that can be achieved. Over 50% of managers feel disconnected from both their responsibilities and their organization’s mission as a whole.

By welcoming their expertise in the program, they can teach participants what must be done to narrow this gap and unify all levels of your organization. If you still need help establishing your leadership development training program, consider working with a professional employer organization (PEO) like Vensure Employer Services. PEOs are masters of human resources and can provide a wide range of resources like evaluation templates, burnout hand books, and recruiting guides to put you on the right path.