Most ineffective leadership development programs take place in an imaginary land free of interpersonal conflict, market pressures, and changing customer demands. In other words, this sort of training is hypothetical and severed from your company’s unique business and challenges.
The context is all wrong. No matter how pithy the content and how challenging the conversation, the hard work of learning happens through doing the work of leading in the place that you lead.
Just as with wild animals, there’s a huge distance between observing things in situ as opposed to in a classroom (or zoo). Learning that takes place outside of the work environment runs the risk of feeling disconnected, and if it’s not relevant to an actual change occurring in the workplace, employees will retain very little.
Why Your Leadership Area Development Roadmap Isn’t Developing Leaders
Can you easily identify the “good” leaders in your organization? The people whose results consistently stand out—who others clamor to work with and for? Who has all the insightful ideas while also championing the agendas of others? Most likely you can. Results speak for themselves, and even without consulting a spreadsheet you probably have a pretty good idea of who your top performers are. Now let’s move on to a more difficult section of the quiz.- How does your organization identify the key leadership capabilities necessary to drive your strategy?
- And once you know what you need, how do you create the systems that replicate said capabilities throughout the organization?
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Truth be told, too many organizations—maybe even yours—don’t have satisfactory responses to these last two questions. The answer, if you can call it that, is “I have no idea.”
Even more troubling, all too often actions taken in the name of development areas for leaders inadvertently undermine the very leadership they seek to build. The leadership-building systems are no good.
How This Insurance Company Went About Corporate Leadership Development And Failed
Let me offer a recent example. Not long ago I was working with a mid-sized insurance company that had just merged with another insurance company of around the same size. As the process was unfolding, the C-Suite at the first company realized it didn’t have enough leaders to staff many of the new jobs that would be created after the merger.
Some of the better leaders had quit after the consolidation, leaving the organization in an even more vulnerable position. But when they went looking for people to fill in they realized few potential candidates had been developed or properly coached. The result? They were caught short.
This absence of talent prompted a harder look at the leadership development plans they had been relying on. You may be familiar with them:
- Three-day workshops.
- Subscriptions to platform video learning content.
- Executive coaches for top execs.
- There was also a leadership book club where participants read trendy new leadership books and talked about them.
For the most part, there were no systematic leadership development opportunities for developing a pipeline in the company. This certainly didn’t fulfill development needs for leaders.
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The three-day workshops were generic leadership content delivered by outside vendors. The senior management training program for newly appointed vice presidents consisted of the CEO coming in to talk to them for a couple of hours about the organization’s values. And the book club was, well, a book club.
Suffice it to say this canned, non-customized leadership growth areas were not very successful in creating better leaders.
Areas for Development for Leaders: The Problem With Good Intentions
Despite this, training reviews were very positive. Because participants offered such positive reviews, the learning and development department assumed they were doing good work. Digging just below the surface, however, revealed an entirely different story.
When we went in and actually assessed the degree to which their leadership development plans were changing behavior—were actually improving leadership capability—we found that they weren’t. They were raising consciousness and making people more aware of what good leadership entailed in theory, sure, but that was about it.
Tip
Creating a leadership growth and development plan to train strong leaders might feel intimidating, but ultimately it’s like anything else on your plate: a project to be successfully executed. If you treat it like a concrete task, as opposed to some sort of mystical exercise that relies largely on good luck and prayer, you’ll be in a much better position to succeed.
This company was hardly alone in having good intentions that never panned out. There’s no doubt that organizations take leadership development seriously; just look at what they spend.
A 2020 Deloitte report put annual global expenditures on senior management training at $50 billion. Training Industry, a leading trade publication, and website in the leadership training world estimated the 2020 figure at almost $358 billion.
This is obviously a huge range. But the takeaway is that corporate leadership development is seen as hugely valuable. In reality, though, it’s often deeply wasteful.
One 2006 study by researchers Russell and Rei suggested that only 10 to 20 percent of all education in the workplace ever gets translated back to the job. I’d be shocked if these figures had increased significantly since then.
Areas of Opportunity for a Leader: Developing Leaders Takes More Than Good Intentions
So why is so much time and money spent on building leadership muscle yielding so little? The first clue is in the question itself.
Most organizations, whether intentionally or not, have invested excessive resources in building stronger leaders—a very different goal than building stronger leadership capacity.
The former focuses on individuals, and most of the devices meant to develop leaders are behavioral interventions aimed at helping individuals think about their own behavior, how others experience their behavior, how they can improve their shortcomings, and how to limit the negative consequences of their personality flaws.
The common denominator in behavioral approaches is “me”; the unit of analysis is reduced to the individual. This perpetuates the faulty notion that leadership is an individual act, reinforcing the very self-involvement that has too often driven employees to resent the leader.
Alas, leaders: this time, it’s not all about you. Thinking beyond yourself is one of the growth areas for leaders.
Development Opportunities for Leaders: Just Talking Is Not an Effective Leadership Development Technique
Additionally, you can’t mold good leaders just by talking. It’s something that’s learned by doing. All of the fancy three-day retreats in the world or lunches with the CEO are no substitute for taking up leadership roles, even if only modestly at first.
Despite piles of insights accumulated over the years about adult learning, organizations are still defaulting to “teaching” leadership, whether it’s delivered by consultants, internal trainers, or line leaders.
“Leadership is not magnetic personality that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ –that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
Peter Drucker
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The bottom line is that you can’t just take someone off-site, sprinkle leadership dust on them, and knight them a leader. You’d be far better off developing leadership in a real-world context, using the real-world challenges your organization faces as material for leadership development.
Wondering how you can do this? Here are three things you need in your corporate leadership development plans.
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1. One of the Most Effective Areas of Opportunity for a Leader…Flip the Script
Effective leadership development often becomes a focus in anticipation of big, disruptive initiatives such as merger integration, organization redesign, new strategy development, etc. I humbly submit that you’d be better off taking the opposite approach: using major change initiatives as the means to develop leadership capacity.
If you take the time to be deliberate, the broad enterprise views and ideas that emerge from this kind of work can be leveraged to your employees’ and organization’s advantage. Building in leadership growth opportunities that directly relate to the change initiative will prompt those involved in the change to reflect on their leadership skills and the implications of the upcoming changes.
When leaders participate in architecting an important new aspect of their organization or its strategy, they inherently have to change the way they think. They must grapple with context—where they are and where they want to be—to be effective doing the work at hand.
But unless they’re specifically empowered to use a change initiative as one of the areas of opportunity for leaders, this opportunity to positively shape their leadership will go untapped.
2. Leverage the Natural Behavior Patterns of Your People in Your Leadership Focus Areas
Each organization is a dynamic system with its own unique culture and people. At your company, for example, every employee (and the team they make up) has their own way of “getting things done.”
Accordingly, understanding the formal and informal circumstances under which people and teams operate best can help you develop leadership capacity.
If you can leverage someone’s natural behavior patterns to develop them in situ, rather than in a way that feels artificial, imposed, or disconnected from everyday context, you will increase their engagement in leadership tasks.
Say, for example, the management team in your marketing department likes to have weekly informal coffee chats. Assuming that they’re performing well, this suggests that they thrive in a recurring but casual context.
Incorporate Leaders’ Preferences Into Areas of Leadership Development
This can be valuable information to know when you assign them more responsibility after a major initiative comes to pass. Instead of scheduling formal team conferences, you could instead check in with the team before or after these chats, or maybe even establish a standing lunch once a week.
There’s another benefit to paying close attention to these behavior patterns: you may also see how certain patterns of leadership are actually undermining overall performance. If that’s the case, you can intervene in real-time by helping leaders modify their choices.
Tip
“I love leadership training!”—said (almost) no employee, ever. But while you may have to battle against inertia or resistance as you begin, a good program that offers real-world value will help win over reluctant employees, and, perhaps, turn them into good leaders.
The perceived need to eliminate redundancies at all costs is another stress point. Redundancies are frustrating—I get it. But in the process of overhauling your systems, there may have to be some overlap until the new system is successfully in place. The alternative is a huge, yawning, customer-frustrating gap.
“Just because you are CEO, don’t think you have landed. You must continually increase your learning, the way you think, and the way you approach the organization. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Indra Nooyi
3. Areas to Grow as a Leader: Speed Up Your Feedback Loops
Real-time data is essential for leaders in order for them to make course corrections, to self-correct, and accelerate performance.
The shorter the timeline between leaders learning about their leadership choices and the organization learning about its collective leadership choices, the quicker performance gains can be realized.
Your task, then, is to build in feedback loops that don’t require cumbersome 360-degree processes that take weeks. Use just-in-time meeting processes that surface feedback on initiatives, strategies, unresolved issues, and attempts to employ new leadership behavior that allows leaders to make just-in-time adjustments.
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Used effectively, well-facilitated focus groups, fast-cycle interview processes, and even brief online survey tools can create feedback loops that strengthen relationships between leaders and encourage the kinds of relationships in which helpful feedback is exchanged routinely and applied confidently.
Understand That Areas of Leadership Development Take Time
Unfortunately, as much as we might wish it were otherwise (especially in the midst of a fresh crisis), building leaders isn’t a weekend or even week-long affair. Like everything else that’s valuable, it takes an investment in time and effort.
Consider the insurance firm we mentioned above, which had recently merged. When we began working with them, after taking stock of the new entity’s unique growth challenges and areas of growth for leaders, we built a twelve-month month leadership cohort program made up of all general managers.
This consisted of everybody who ran a P&L or a line of business, about twenty-four people altogether.
The program’s major tasks involved:
- Setting strategy;
- Identifying the best opportunities for growth and how to lead staff to take advantage of them; and
- Understanding how they would think about their competitor set.
All essential elements for truly understanding their organizational context. It also included one-on-one mentoring from senior executives, as well as peer coaching. Everyone in the cohort would meet weekly to talk candidly about their areas of development for leaders and the challenges they were facing.
It was a robust, integrated program that was rooted in each organization’s unique needs, each manager’s development needs; and the relationships that served supported both.
At the end of the year, performance in each department had either improved a little bit or a lot, and there were measurable improvements in management performance. Each reported that their leadership was much stronger. And when we did check-ins with their direct reports, all of them reported seeing notable differences from their leaders and how they led.
This process worked because we didn’t take people out of their natural environment, spruce them up, and then send them back home. We helped the organization cultivate leaders on their own turf, focusing on real-world leadership focus areas, within their own unique context. As the saying goes, home is where the heart of a successful leadership cohort is.
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