Is It Time to Pull the Plug on Leadership Development Programs?
Here’s a quick experiment for you: Google “Leadership Development.” You will find countless organizations, articles, training programs and consultants ready to help. If you do the same on Amazon, you’ll be presented with over 60,000 results. No wonder Leadership Development is a $366B industry[1].
Everyone is trying to develop leaders, and we’ve been at it for decades. But who is doing it successfully? Despite the investments being made in leadership development, how many organizations can objectively claim they have enough of the right leaders in place today? And how many organizations can say with confidence that they have identified and prepared their next generation of leaders?
The challenges we have faced this year have forced us to rethink so many aspects of how we do business, but one thing that has remained constant is the need for great leadership. The good news is organizations see value in developing leaders and continue to spend billions of dollars every year in an attempt to do so. The most common strategy is to put current and emerging leaders through a program or course, which often represents the majority of their investment.
Yet, when asked, 75 percent of organizations say their programs are ineffective[2]. Research shows people almost always forget what they’re taught in these courses, and most often fail to put what they learn into practice. Most leaders attend the event and then go back to behaving the way they always have. The bottom line is that the time and dollars spent in an attempt to build leaders might be the most under-performing investment a company makes–high costs and very little results in return.
So where is the disconnect between the importance and the effectiveness of these programs?
To shed some insight into this, and to help as you reevaluate your leadership development strategies in light of these challenging times, I will offer five key areas where I’ve seen leadership programs go wrong:
1. Wrong Measure of Success – Real leadership is less about what you do, and more about the effect of your actions on others. Yet many leadership programs focus on the people in the training room and not on what needs to be done to impact the people outside the room—those you are leading. Success shouldn’t be focused on simply completing the program and getting a certificate or a diploma. Instead, measure success by assessing sustainable behavioral change and the ultimate results that get delivered not by the leader, but through the teams they lead. In the words of Peter Drucker, “The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.” As leaders, it’s not about us, it’s about those we lead.
2. Wrong Place – I often ask leaders about their most impactful development experiences. Their response always confirms that we learn best by doing. Sure, training, education, coaching and mentoring are important, but what matters most is doing. If this is true, and it is, why does the development box so often get checked when we attend a class or complete a program. Rather than always looking to the next book or classroom experience to develop ourselves and others, the right place to develop is on the job. The most impactful development happens when we step into a new role, manage a new team or try to lead through an unfamiliar and challenging situation.
3. Wrong Delivery Method – Typically, leadership programs are multi-day events that leave participants saturated with content. We can only hope they remember what was covered and have the discipline to actually put their learning into practice. But research suggests that within 6 days, people forget 75% of the content[3]. I have found the most effective method to be the “drip” rather than the “fire hose.” Drip means to teach one or two concepts and give the leader time to put these into practice before offering the next. In my experience, if leaders simply do one or two things differently, they are ahead of over 90 percent of all others, and the Drip method has been much more successful in achieving this goal.
4. Wrong Person Teaching – Another issue that leads to ineffective leadership programs is they are too often designed and delivered by those who lack true hands-on experience leading people and organizations. While I believe one can be an effective facilitator of content delivery with a range of backgrounds, developing effective leaders requires much more. A good facilitator plays an important role, but often missing from the development experience are the organization’s most senior and successful leaders. These individuals must be engaged in teaching, coaching, leading by example, and holding the leaders below them accountable for applying their learning on the job. The best learning often occurs “off-script” and outside the binder, using real-life, company-specific examples. Don’t let your senior team get away with abdicating their responsibility to develop a leadership pipeline to the HR department or an external vendor. They need to own it and engage in the teaching process.
5. Wrong Content – Leadership is about the routines you use and the impact you have on those you are leading. Developing as a leader is much more than understanding concepts and theory–and it doesn’t stop with polishing personality traits. We should be teaching leaders effective practices that reflect more about what they do, not just who they are. These include practices related to setting direction, creating alignment and optimizing talent. Admittedly, there is great content out there that’s simple, memorable and effective. However, I find introducing the steady stream of books, articles, language, tools and models overwhelms leaders with concepts that have limited shelf life and are disconnected to the previous ones. What’s required is well-defined development architecture that uses simple concepts and practices to create a consistent leadership experience across your organization.
As our business climate forces us to challenge our every assumption, the need for effective leaders will only intensify. Especially during these unpredictable times, why not challenge our assumptions about what it takes to prepare those who will lead us into this uncertain future? The good news is that the approaches outlined above lend themselves well to a fast-changing, iterative, and virtual work environment.
Look for the next article in this series, “The Ten Talents of Exceptional Leaders”.
[1] Forbes, June 2019
[2] https://trainingindustry.com/content/uploads/2017/07/CLS_influence_leadership.pdf
[3] Mark Bingham, Instructure