Leadership development can play a critical role in supporting leaders’ effectiveness and the resulting success of organisations. Leaders face a multitude of organisational and personal challenges on an almost daily basis. So enabling them to keep sharp, acquire new skills and build their self-awareness is critical.
However, not everything labelled leadership development actually works or even has a positive impact. Poorly designed and deployed leadership development activities can serve as a potential breeding ground for misunderstandings, misinformation, unneeded stress and pressure and wasted time and money.
In this post, I want to share ten of the ways we see leadership development programmes going wrong and why they’re so problematic. These include the design of the programme, its content, the development ethos and the consideration of impact.
1. Insufficient time for development
Leaders need time to absorb new information and make sense of it from their own perspective. It’s simply not enough to grab an hour here and there. Short slices of time, grabbed while they’re ostensibly gathered together for other reasons, don’t give participants the opportunity to get into ‘learning mode’ and extract themselves from the day job. Which brings me to the second point.
2. No time to focus
Organisations often point to the opportunity cost of bringing senior employees together for development time. I’d suggest that this cost is going to be far higher if leaders aren’t given the space to really focus on their development, rather than keep going with their usual routine and responsibilities. Leaders need permission to steps away from the in-box, the endless online meetings and the ‘just 5 mins’ pleas for a chat. Make leaders’ development time sacred – if their direct reports can’t survive without them for a day, then it means you have bigger problems to contend with!
3. Lack of evidence
Even when sufficient time is available for leaders to really engage with a development programme, we’re still left with the challenge of what’s actually included in the curriculum. Leadership programmes frequently fall back on myths and truisms about performance, organisational change and developing others – to name but a few. And then there’s the wildly inaccurate ways personality is ‘measured’ and discussed. Without a foundation of quality scientific evidence, you’re at risk of sharing out of date and inaccurate claims with the people who have the most impact in your organisation.
4. Reliance on ‘motivational speakers’
Organisations often invest large sums in retaining the services of ‘Motivational speakers’ to enthuse their leaders on a programme. Retired athletes. Mountaineers. Authors. TV celebrities. Even former politicians. If framed as entertainment, that’s one thing. But when framed as a source of leadership lessons and practice, we often find they’re short on evidence, high on opinion, and basically inapplicable to practical leadership in their 21st Century.
5. Book-based leadership fads
There’s a particular pitfall that almost perfectly combines the risks of evidence-free content and the motivational speaker. It’s when a CEO has encountered a business book that has resonated with them and make it required reading for their leadership team. Worse still, when that book is accompanied by workshops, tools and methods that have no evidence or data to support them. This quickly turns into an expensive, time-consuming and disruptive organisational fad.
6. No practical application
Even the best, most valid concepts and theories lose relevance and impact if participants’ insights aren’t turned into action. So many leadership programmes are strong on ideas but fall far short of supporting leaders when it comes to turning ideas into workable activity once they’re back at work. At best, new ideas are filed away for future references. At worst, they’re forgotten within days once the demands of the day job take over.
7. Leadership development framed as a reward
Often the whole purpose of a leadership development programme is lost when the emphasis is on rewarding high performers. When involvement in a structured leadership development programme framed as reward, then it can quickly look like an exclusive and unwelcoming club, not an opportunity for aspiring leaders to get the input and support they need to up their game. If you’ve spent more time thinking about the fancy venue than the content of the programme it’s hosting, then you might be falling into this trap.
8. A lack of transparency
When the criteria for access to a leadership development programme are unclear, it can leave employees feeling the process is unfair or stacked against them. Similarly, the lack of a clear, desired outcome means both participants and other key stakeholders can be unsure what to expect in terms of impact or change. It quickly turns into a ‘sheep dip’ experience where the only thing being tracked is attendance.
9. Copying what others are doing
When you’re designing your most important development intervention – in terms of likely impact and cost, at any rate – why would you simply copy what another organisation is doing? Why copy organisations that don’t share your values, sector, priorities or strategy? While there are doubtless lessons to be learn from other organisation, you’ll miss out on lots of key contextual points of differentiation if you don’t configure development programmes for your own organisation. In any event, your competitors might simply be rolling out an evidence-free programme of motivational speakers – do you really want to copy that?
10. No evaluation
Possibly the most common error I see in leadership development is the absence of any attempt to measure its impact. Don’t get me wrong – evaluation is far from simple. But it’s made easier by thinking about desired impact at the outside and gathering more than ‘happy sheets’ from your programme participants. How will you know if a programme is up-skilling your leaders if you don’t explore its impact?
Up next
In the next post in this series, we’ll share some ways to counter these pitfalls. Meanwhile, you can check out our Sustainable Leadership hub and download our free Sustainable Leadership white paper for more insights on this incredibly important topic.
