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THE NEED TO MOVE BEYOND THE POPULAR APPROACH
The most common approach to improving leadership is developmental. It gives primacy to individuals and their needs. Whilst some development methods - such as mentoring, projects, and 360 degree feedback - take account of the organisation's context, much development activity is course based and has the following characteristics:-
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It often takes place off the job (classroom or outdoors). |
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It assumes universal leadership truths. |
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It develops generic skills. |
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It employs abstract learning material. |
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It tends to isolate learners from their real environment. |
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It takes little account of current issues in the organisation. |
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It assumes that tomorrow's needs are similar to today's. |
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It ring-fences development activity and practitioners. |
From a provider's perspective, the traditional course is convenient, repetitive, easy for clients to recognise, simple to budget for, fun to deliver, and it doesn't tread on people's toes. On the other hand, some of these features may lead to a lack of integration with the organisation. This may result in an inability to meet the business's own specific leadership needs.
The use of Lego™ building bricks on courses is illustrative. As a training psychologist put it, Lego is valuable for "creating metaphors and stories that add meaning to our identity … imbuing our descriptions of our workplace with emotion". That may be so, but methods that are not grounded in the learner's current reality suffer from a crucial drawback: they rarely threaten the status quo in the learner's organisation. As someone once said: "If we come here today and there's no trouble tomorrow, we haven't done our job!"
The superficial attraction of Lego and similar learning aids is their distance from reality. This makes their use psychologically safe and non-threatening. Indeed, that feature is explicitly marketed as a strong selling point, and it can be an important consideration for individual learners. But this may not be what the organisation itself needs. While the individual may learn quite a lot, think in new ways, and perhaps change a little, the organisation and its current top managers won't come under much pressure to change.
Such generic development activity is rarely associated with 'change management' - though this is often what the organisation needs, whether it acknowledges it or not. For bosses, sending staff on a course is a low-risk activity. It is thus a politically attractive option for organisations. For some it takes little more than a budget.
Training and educational activities are intended to develop individual managers' leadership skills, roles, qualities and know-how. However worthwhile, the approach is a means to an end. It is an input to improving the quantity and nature of leadership practised in the individual's organisation.
But what really matters is the output. Ultimately we are looking for actual leadership, not leadership development, and certainly not an intellectual discussion of various historical figures' leadership styles (interesting though that may be). We hope that such active leadership will lead to a successful business outcome for the organisation and for all those with a stake in its success.
The painful reality is that much development activity has difficulty delivering full value for its company sponsors. Courses, outdoor experiences, mentoring, projects and 360 degree feedback may satisfy the expectations of individuals seeking personal development, but these processes rarely produce sustained improvement for the organisation as a whole, or for its many stakeholders.
While many organisations make provision for leadership development programmes, potential is often wasted. Contributing reasons include:
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Programmes may not be driven by the carefully thought-out and express needs of the organisation. Developers cannot, or choose not to, align individual learning with the organisation's agenda(s). |
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Learning and energy can be squandered through a lack of co-ordination with colleagues. |
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Good intentions can fall victim to the difficulty individuals face in transferring the benefit of learning to daily life. |
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Improvement activity may be delegated to developers who receive little strategic supervision and challenge by top management. |
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Activity aimed at improving leadership may be narrow and ignore a range of possibilities, of which developing individual capability is merely one. |
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Leaders may apply their talents to doing wrong things, some of which may be unethical. |
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High turnover of leaders is tolerated without careful controls or learning from terminations (both voluntary and involuntary). |
It may sound harsh criticism, but a lot of money is spent on developing talent and pouring it down a leaky pipe.
The search for something better
Studies that attempt to analyse the leadership shortfall are normally written from a training provider's perspective. These analyses find it hard to delve into what goes on inside organisations. Yet we need to ask:
'What are the internal dynamics that help or hinder the conduct of successful leadership, and what gets in the way of improvement?' |
It is in the heart of organisations that we find the vital clues to making the leadership effort cohesive and pointed in the right direction.
Individual-focused development has its place. It can sometimes helps individuals in their jobs. But if this is your main strategy for getting the organisation to where it needs and wants to be, and for curing its present ailments, then you're in trouble. What you need is a more organisation-focused perspective. Such an approach:
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clarifies the organisation's needs for leadership |
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puts the organisation's needs to the forefront |
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adopts an improvement, not development, mindset |
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works on the culture, systems and structures that support or constrain the exercise of leadership |
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provides development programmes with relevant context, concerns and content. |
© William Tate, Prometheus Consulting, 2003
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