The Challenge

Most estimates put the global investment in leadership development at over $300 billion per year (2), and yet only 10% of CEOs believe their company’s leadership development initiatives have a clear business impact (3). That’s $270 billion down the drain, year in, year out. What’s going wrong?

All too often, businesses draw up a long laundry list of all the skills leaders need, before initiating a laborious and painful process of psychometric assessment to identify where their leaders are at. Next up, it’s time to design large scale leadership programmes that take a huge investment of time and money. They’re often focused on trying to change 10 things at once, encourage independent, theoretical learning over team development, and fail to embed any real shift in leadership capability in their teams, where the work gets done.

The solution - Develop for the context, Develop in the work

So, how can we develop leaders in a way which has real impact? The key is focusing on what the organisation and the collective leadership team needs to achieve, so we are developing the business at the same time as its leaders.

1. Get leaders rationally and emotionally committed to doing things differently

• Get leaders to buy into the shifts required with a strong case for change. This could be using a 360 perspective from the business on what is and isn’t working about leadership today or top down what is needed to deliver the strategy. What happens if we make these shifts?
• Bring new perspectives and stimulus to challenge leaders’ assumptions and habits, getting them motivated to look beyond their usual patterns of thinking.

2. Focus on the unlock and do it 'in the work'

• Ground it in real life work and projects. Use business initiatives or strategic programmes as a launchpad to enable learning, so development is ‘just in time’. If the development is tied to what leaders need to get done, they’re much more likely to a) make the time for it and b) actually apply it.
• Too much theory and leaders will switch off, focus on the practical principles that will unlock the most value in the context of what needs to get done.
• At John Lewis Partnership we worked with a group of 20 senior leaders accountable for the delivery of the top strategic priorities within the business. Focusing on the context that they needed to deliver in, we designed a leadership learning journey that not only equipped the group with new skills, but actually accelerated progress in their programmes.

3. Make it a team sport

• Imagine each member of a symphony orchestra practicing individually, and only coming together for their performance. This is how leadership development usually works. Don’t focus on trying to get every leader to be a fully well-rounded individual that ticks all the boxes in your competency matrix. Instead, take a collective view of high performance – it’s the leadership team that will make all the difference.
• Connect individual development and collective development of the team, by embedding social learning practices into your approach. Consider using existing brightspots in the organisation, and enable skill sharing across the business

4. Equip them to challenge the status quo

• We’ve seen businesses where leaders are developed and equipped with the skills to lead in an experimental and agile way, but all too often they return to their teams only to find that the red tape is still stuck on as tight as ever, and the overriding culture of their wider teams is ‘that’s not the way we do things around here’. Before long, they’ll be reverting to the old way of doing things.
• We need to set leaders up to change their behaviour in imperfect context. As leaders learn and apply new behaviours in the work they will inevitably run into the normalising effects of the current culture. The development journey needs to prepare them for this and enable debate between leaders that helps uncover these roadblocks, while simultaneously fixing them to magnify the impact of their behaviour changes.

5. Help them learn to learn

• Instil a learning mindset in leaders so they continually spot opportunities to develop and build capability
• Embed practices that support development - coaching, feedback, retrospectives and other mechanisms make continual learning inevitable
• At Tesco, we developed a behaviour change approach that gave leaders the headspace, stimulus and tools to identify the shifts they wanted to make and determine specific behavioural actions that would get them there.

Sources
1. scholarworks.waldenu.edu
2. trainingindustry.com
3. www.mckinsey.com