From our vantage point, the return on these investments has fallen seriously short of its potential. We also suspect that many CEOs would not turn to leadership development as the first choice lever to improve their organization's performance.
We'll start with the primary reason why our interventions come up short. Most development initiatives focus on the individual. In other words, the models and activities are all about improving individual actors. Yet, for the most part, the exercise of leadership in organizations is not an individual act. Despite the continued popularity of the "great man" theory of leadership and our romantic attachment to the idea of an individual that's going to "ride in and save the day," leadership is a team sport.
The complexity, interconnectedness and transparency of today's organizations mean that no one individual can get much accomplished by themselves. Most challenges and opportunities are systemic. Leadership is distributed and change now requires a collective sense and a coordinated set of actions.
What's more, leadership is exercised within a team or broader organizational context — whether a project team, intact leadership team, or cross-functional team. If it's all about leading together — and that's the way work gets done and change happens — then why is so much of the leadership field still focused on developing people as individual leaders? We suspect that the answer lies in the fact that the field is a prisoner of a long history of models and pedagogies built around an emphasis on the individual leader.
Our second concern is that the focus on individual leader development has led to a focus on leadership attributes versus leadership issues facing the enterprise. For this reason, most programs are designed around behavioral competency models. Companies spend a lot of time and money on leadership behaviors, while the real leadership issues facing the organization are left unattended.
For example, a company's overriding leadership concerns might be critical shifts in strategy or product innovation or new competitive threats — not competency models. In too many cases, learning and development staff labor over creating award-winning attribute-based programs for companies that suffer a host of real business leadership problems. Just three years ago investment banks had some of the so-called best leadership programs in the industry. When leadership development becomes distinct from what leaders do every day, there are substantial risks to the quality of leadership practice within the organization.
It is time to shift our emphasis in executive education towards collective development and towards content focused on addressing enterprise challenges.
A More Strategic Approach to Development
As others in this blog series have variously suggested, the time has come forexecutive development adopt the construct of "shared leadership." Nobody leads in a vacuum and development programs need to take this into account.
As for our second concern, the concept of action-learning programs has been gaining momentum since the 1980s — but it's never been so vital as it is today. Leaders confronting constant change and great complexity need marketplace experience with the intensity and speed of strategic and organizational change. Leadership development interventions should support these drivers — they're likely to have the greatest payoff, and they are likely to be the easiest to sell to any CEO contemplating an investment in executive education. Educational initiatives have to become far more customized and tightly integrated with the organization's strategic agenda; their aim will be to build leadership capabilities while simultaneously facilitating progress towards critical strategic objectives.
This shift in practice requires a new frame, with new guiding questions: What must the organization do in order to win in its marketplace, and how can the executive group be best utilized as a lever to achieve these ends? It's a strategic lens, defining first the desired business outcomes, and then evaluating the how various programs might support those goals. The ends drive the means — leadership development managers don't select a solution before defining a problem or opportunity. CEOs and their teams will also need to adopt a new mindset — and assume greater responsibility for the development and mobilization of their executive talent pool, rather than leaving the job to HR.
And this new generation of initiatives requires a greater appetite for the real and messy work of making change happen in organizations. These interventions blur lines between formal education and learning while doing, between time spent on the business and time spent doing the business, between lines of business and functions, and between a formally bounded effort and the longer time frame required to drive change.
Trina Soske is Partner, Head of the Americas, at Oliver Wyman Leadership Development. Jay Conger, is the Henry R. Kravis Research Chair in Leadership Studies at Claremont McKenna College and the author of numerous Harvard Business Review articles, most recently (with Doug Ready and Linda Hill) the June 2010 piece "Are You A High Potential?"
(Editor's note: This post is part of a six-week blog series on how leadership might look in the future. The conversations generated by these posts will help shape the agenda of a symposium on the topic in June 2010, hosted by HBS's Nitin Nohria, Rakesh Khurana, and Scott Snook. This week's focus: leadership development.)
source: http://blogs.hbr.org/imagining-the-future-of-leadership/2010/06/time-to-shift-the-paradigm-of.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
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