Michael Couch and Richard Citrin recently published an important new
book entitled Strategy-Driven Leadership:The Playbook for Developing Your Next Generation of Leaders. This book places business strategy first and
maintains an emphasis on building leadership programs around what it will take
to make the business successful as opposed to implementing a program in the
hopes that it will benefit the strategy.
I spoke with Michael and
Richard this month and asked them: “Given
that most organizations spend significant resources on developing their
leaders, why are most leadership-development efforts relatively ineffective in
the long run?”
Here is their complete answer:
In Strategy-Driven Leadership, we cite several factors related to the ineffectiveness of most
leadership development initiatives. Let’s discuss three of the most critical
factors.
First of all, many approaches to leadership development
ignore context. By this we mean that any development initiative must be built
from a strong and clear strategic or business case. Designing effective
development starts with the question, “Why exactly are we doing this?” -- so that
the intended business impact of any investment in development is established at
the get go. We call this “framing” the development.
Related to context, a second factor that is important to the
effectiveness of leadership development is to have learners understand and
focus on leadership competencies that are directly linked to the strategy of
the business. Strategies vary across
organizations and the strategy of an individual business can change over time.
For development to make a difference, strategy must be translated into the
unique skills required of leaders to execute the strategy.
Third, organizations often take a one-size-fits-all approach
to developing their leaders by buying an off-the-shelf program and requiring
all leaders to attend the training. You’ll see this kind of program something
like “these 5 factors are essential for every leader to possess.” This approach
is seldom effective because it ignores the fact that the development needs of
individual leaders vary greatly. There’s just no way that a single program can
address those diverse needs. In addition, and probably more importantly,
critical leadership competencies cannot be learned in a classroom. Real
leadership skill-building occurs through navigating and learning from a
challenging job or assignment. Our model for developing strategy-critical
leadership skills, called Intentional Leadership Development, capitalizes on
learning from experience so that development is built into everyday work and
not bolted on as something extra to do.
