If you Google ‘leadership development’ you’ll get 28
million results; the top of the page starts with ads from Accenture asking
‘what are the leadership traits you need right now’, Henley Exec Education offering
leadership programs with the slogan ‘inspire and lead others’, and then
Imperial College London and Harvard Business School offering leadership
development courses; followed next by Wikipedia offering one of many
definitions, stating that “leadership development expands the capacity of
individuals to perform in leadership roles within organizations. Leadership
roles are those that facilitate execution of a company's strategy through
building alignment, winning mindshare and growing the capabilities of others.”
But for all the hype and great ‘talk’ about leadership
development being about ‘inspiring and leading others’ and ‘winning mindshare’
– I would suggest that leadership in practice is going backwards in the early
21st Century and is not evolving like those making significant
amounts of money from leadership development would like you to believe.
So unless ‘we’ genuinely recognize this trend and make a significant
shift from ‘hype’ to ‘action’ then I predict that by 2030 most organizations around
the world will be run by command and control type leaders, who will have little
thought or care about ‘inspiring and motivating their staff’ – and even if they
did care, they won’t have the skills or basic knowledge to be an inspirational
leader.
What’s causing this leadership development dilemma?
There are, in my humble opinion, many factors helping
subdue effective leadership development within organizations and allow bad,
ineffective leadership to be the rule rather than the exception in today’s
business environment.
First and foremost we have too many poor leaders
developing the next generation of ‘poor’ leaders – and hence rather than great
leaders developing great leaders, we have the exact opposite. These poor
leaders know they’re not setting the example, but they honestly don’t care.
Most are in very senior positions or are sitting on boards – and simply aren’t
going to put their hands up and say ‘hey, I shouldn’t be in this position’,
mostly because they already have the power and don’t see that they need much of
anything else; and with the power comes the pay check – so life is easy and
good. If things go wrong they’ve always got someone to blame – and God forbid
they do inspire their workforce – as then a ‘worker-bee’ might disrupt that
simple cushy life they have.
What about the leader’s goal of optimising
‘organizational performance’ you might ask, surely their lack of leadership
skills will be spotted sooner or later. Sadly they have a booklet of ‘get out
of jail free’ quotes to use when things don’t go right and have plenty of
excuses for why ‘things’ aren’t improving. The classic these days is to still blame
‘the global economy’ or ‘the global financial crisis’ – in the very near future
the Brits and Europeans will blame ‘Brexit’ and imagine others around the world
will find some reason to blame their failure to optimize performance on Donald
Trump.
Since corporate boards are no longer strong enough or
vigilant enough to spot the ‘rot’ of their leadership development in their own
organisations – it needs other stakeholders, be these shareholders or
customers, to start using the power they genuinely have to make a positive
change to leadership development in the workplace. It will have a positive
difference on all stakeholders, if they do.
Second, the institutions offering leadership development
aren’t following through on their ‘promises’ and again organizations aren’t
ensuring that they follow through either. Meaning that there are some great
leadership development programs out there – but it’s one thing to learn the
theory, but it’s all meaningless if the participants can’t implement the theory
back in their workplace. It should be common sense that simply having attended
a course doesn’t make you a better leader – it’s what you do with the knowledge
you’ve learnt that defines you (and the program). But for many leadership
development companies it’s all about ‘profit’ rather than genuine results.
Leadership has to change from the top – if the executives
are all command and control leaders, then you aren’t going to change anything
until they change – or at least recognize the need to change. This doesn’t mean
if you’re working under these conditions that you’re necessarily a bad leader –
in fact you may inspire and motivate your own team, within the overriding
command and control culture – but you will be a very frustrated leader sooner
or later.
What needs to change for organisations that want the genuine
reality of great leaders – rather than just the hype – is for them to see
leadership development through to its conclusion. This means first developing a
transparent leadership model that will define your corporate leaders (and hence
your culture). This won’t be made up of fuzzy buzz words that sound good – but
will be the genuine skills and competencies that you expect from your leaders.
Then you’ll implement ways for your staff to appraise their leaders without
fear of retribution.
Once you’ve developed your model you’ll need to re-develop
all those currently in leadership roles, in some cases finding the right
mentors to help them develop on the job – and then, most importantly, the
organization must have the strength and conviction to remove those leaders from
their positions that don’t transform within an agreed period of time.
You’ll also need to have a focused development program
for all your emerging leaders and your leadership pipeline, from bottom to top.
This developmental pipeline needs to be transparent and reviewed on an annual
basis – and ideally it will be run in-house.
Finally leaders should seek out feedback from their staff
– asking ‘how can I improve as a leader’. This should be done on at least an
annual basis and leaders should be reviewing their development against these
goals. In fact in my experience – the really genuine great leaders are
constantly seeking ways to be better leaders – whereas the poor leaders are
confident they are already there and shun feedback, believing that being made a
leader is recognition enough that they are brilliant at their job – showing a
genuine lack of appreciation for (1) what leadership is all about and (2) that
you can always improve as a leader.
What the world needs now are motivational and
inspirational leaders to take organizations forward into the future – leaders
that don’t look for excuses why things can’t be done, but who are always
looking for opportunities to improve themselves, their departments and their
organisations. Leaders who inspire loyalty from their staff, a rare trait in the
current business climate; and leaders who constantly want to better themselves
and aren’t afraid of feedback from their staff, in fact they crave it.
