Most leadership development programs are a waste of money – in this short paper (2-min read) we discuss how to get it right.

Leadership Development – Making it Stick!

Last week I read the article, Leadership Development is Broken. Here’s How to Fix it, a piece published in Fast Company and authored by David Rock and Laura Cassiday.

In the article, the authors (correctly) claim that, ‘None of today’s commonly used options provide lasting learning at a reasonable cost and timeframe that scales to all leaders in an organization’ with only 23% of leaders rating their leadership development as high quality.  You can read the article here: https://www.fastcompany.com/91149719/leadership-development-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it

A few years ago, we posted the article: Most Leadership Programs Fail, that investment dollars are wasted due to poorly designed programs and, where participants do not typically change their behaviour following learning programs, or if they do, quickly revert to their old ways.

In our piece, we stressed that success is dependent on making new learnings ‘stick’ and claimed that People At Their Best avoids 4 common pitfalls of leadership development programs in the following ways:

1. We understand the organisational context (and needs), and set defined aims to improve the business with very specific development in areas like BD skills or collaboration skills, rather than an alphabet soup of cool sounding but generic skills.
2. We make development stick by tying learnings directly to activities that people perform back on the job, that is, all our programs are built around requirements that people face in their roles and we practice ‘live’ and real situations like upcoming difficult conversations, presentations or negotiations – it’s all about application and new habit formation and for this, participants need to be able to put new insights into practice and then be held accountable to the new behaviours.
3. We understand mindsets and identify why people may not be performing – often not a skills deficit but mindset issues like an avoidance of conflict or change. Further, we noted that the front-end of our programs provide participants with insights, awareness and understanding through psychometrics, 360-feedbacks and reflection exercises (this insight, awareness and understanding is critical to legitimise the required behavioural change).
4. We measure return on our programs through feedback, evaluated behavioural change and most importantly through improved organisational performance like cost savings, increased revenue and productivity improvements.

In the years since we originally posted our article, we have come to view much of our work as capacity building.  This is important because while most companies have ambitious targets and growth agendas, we have found that many do not have the leadership capabilities to deliver on those targets and realise growth.  In fact, studies find that 50% of the skills leaders need today are skills that leaders don’t have!  In this sense, validated and properly designed leadership development presents a massive opportunity for most organisations.

As we say above, when it comes to capacity building, it is all about habit formation and making new habits stick.  For this, we can not overstate the value of social learning, the opportunity to practice new skills and to focus on the skills required in the leader’s role, the organisational context.

For these reasons, when it comes to capacity building, when it comes to building leadership capability, digital and online learning platforms are found wanting.  So, while such platforms have scale and cost benefits (giving lots of people access to training), and are good at pushing large numbers of participants through training (often important for compliance purposes), participants have told us that you can’t digitise the value of the face-to-face experience.  This is an argument made strongly in the Leadership Development is Broken article at the top of this post, mirroring our thinking that technology ought to augment and support the learning experience rather than replace it.

When considering why this is the case, we find ourselves highlighting the superpower, empathy.  At this point in time, technology cannot demonstrate empathy and build the trust which fuels insights and awareness, which helps people feel valued and which helps people to make sense of the complexity around them.  Nor can technology alone, help people see a pathway to a better future – this requires empathy rich interactions that allow for pressure-testing ideas, cognitive dissonance and fierce support.  Certainly, this in itself, explains the value of, and return from face-face leadership development, at least as the primary methodology for most programs.

Furthermore, our brains are also highly receptive to social learning, it has greater salience and this guides what we give our attention to and motivates our behaviour – the foundation for learning and for making it stick!