KS Systems, LLC Five Reasons Why Leadership Development Fails And Tips for Avoiding These Obstacles Keith Q Owen, Robert Culbertson, and Steve Dietz 2014 [Type text] KS S Y S T E M S, LLC 2 0 1 4
Five Reasons Why Leadership Development Fails By Keith Owen, Robert Culbertson, and Steven Dietz For years, organizations have lavished time and money on improving the capabilities of managers and on nurturing new leaders. US companies alone spend almost $14 billion annually on leadership development. 1 Moreover, when upward of 500 executives were asked to rank their top three humancapital priorities, leadership development was included as both a current and a future priority. Almost two-thirds of the respondents identified leadership development as their number-one concern. 2 In spite of this, only 7% of CEO s believe they are effective at developing their future leaders and just about a third of organizations think they do a good job of developing future leaders. 3 Further, around 30 percent of US companies admit that they have failed to exploit their international business opportunities fully because they lack enough leaders with the right capabilities. 4 Why is the performance of leadership development processes sub-optimal? We have looked into this issue for over seven years and have come up with an approach for optimizing the stickiness of leadership development programs. Optimization is a systemic process that looks at the total learning system of an organization and identifies the processes that facilitate and/or inhibit leadership improvement and takes the steps required to eliminate gaps or negative feedback loops in the system that impede leadership development. In the process, we ve identified a set of the most common impediments to successful leadership development. Here we explain some tips to overcome them. Together, they suggest ways for companies to get more from their leadership-development efforts and ultimately their leaders. 1. Failure to Link Required Expertise to Leadership Development Efforts Every organization operates in a context which includes its customers and their needs and expectations. To succeed in this context, whatever it is, organizations must exhibit a high degree of expertise in at least one of several disciplines, including: Innovation Operational Excellence Speed Quality Culture Overtime, many organizations forget this basic lesson in design and they plan their leadership development based on the current fad about what superior leadership is rather than on an 1 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin
understanding of what their organizational needs to be successful in the current and emerging market place. One effect of this this is that emerging leaders get entangled in learning things that are not highly relevant to the current and future performance of their organization. Context is as important for groups and individuals as it is for organizations as a whole: the best programs explicitly tailor a from to path for each participant based on the capability requirements of the context in which the emerging leaders are going to think and act. This is critical, for it determines the kinds of opportunities you can provide for your emerging leader group. Many of the training initiatives we come across rest on the assumption that one size fits all and that the same group of skills or style of leadership is appropriate regardless of strategy, organizational culture, or CEO mandate. In the earliest stages of planning a leadership initiative, companies should ask themselves a simple question: what, precisely, is this program for? Focusing on context inevitably means equipping leaders with a small number of competencies (two to three) that will make a significant difference to performance. 2. A Lack of Understanding of True Learning Needs. Adults learn best when they need to learn. Most companies think of need in terms of a gap between a current and a desired behaviorally-defined skill set. While these skill-sets may be easy to assess, they are actually less important to leadership success than the deeper seated motives and mind-sets that determines how a person perceives, thinks, decides, and acts, which in many cases are hard to assess. So, readiness is one of the more complex barriers to program effectiveness for it involves understanding and assessing underlying, deep seated competencies and mindsets. Identifying some of the deepest, below the surface thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and beliefs is usually a precondition of behavioral change but one that is too often shirked in development programs. This impedes the learning process because we are not in a position to help individuals understand their needs prior to a development program, nor are we prepared organizationally to help them confront these needs later on as they are struggling to learn and grow. Promoting the virtues of delegation and empowerment, for example, is fine in theory, but successful adoption is unlikely if the program participants have a clear controlling mind-set (I can t lose my grip on the business; I m personally accountable and only I should make the decisions). It s true that some personality traits (such as extroversion or introversion) are difficult to shift, but people can change the way they see the world and their values. 3. A Lack of Systemic Support People go to learning and development programs, get all fired up, and then come back to work as usual. Hardly fertile ground for taking up the challenge of learning new ways of being a leader, which task requires commitment, discipline, concentration, and most of all on-going support. Yet it is this very challenge that emerging leaders are expected to fulfill. We talked to hundreds of managers four months after they had returned to their jobs and ask them to identify the issues that impacted their ability to learn and growth. Some of these people had enjoyed 2 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin
immense success in creating new revenues for their companies and in reducing costs while others described the high level of frustration they had experienced trying to find the time and opportunity to apply this learning. Almost without exception, the people who failed told us it was too many and competing priorities, a lack of involvement and support from their one-up manager, a lack of opportunities to use their new learning in any relevant manner, the lack of opportunity to collaborate, and the lack of feedback about their performance. In short they experienced an almost total lack of systemic support. The starting point of our evaluation research is a definition of leadership effectiveness. Leadership effectiveness is the process of getting results through others by creating an achievement oriented, relationship based endeavor. Leadership development, then, is getting improved organizations results though the work of others and is the outcome of a systemic and systematic set of activities designed to improve leadership effectiveness. 4. A Lack of Relevant Opportunities When it comes to planning a program, organization s face a daunting challenge: balancing the value of off-site programs (many in university-like settings) that offer participants time to step back and escape the pressing demands of a day job with the reality of the learning process. Adults typically retain just 10 percent of what they hear in classroom lectures but they retain nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing. Furthermore, new leaders, no matter how talented, often struggle to transfer even their most powerful off-site experiences into changed behavior on the front line. What seems to work is business relevant action learning opportunities that give people the chance to work with peers in doing things that directly benefit the organization. 5. A Lack of Measurement You cannot change what you cannot measure; yet, just barely a handful of companies actually have taken the time and energy to quantify the outcomes expected of their leadership development efforts. Perhaps this is because the task is not an easy one and is made even more difficult because the outcomes that must be measured involve the actions and performance of others. Nevertheless, companies that measure the impacts of the leadership development efforts, both at the participant level and at the level of the people he is charged with influencing (e.g., direct reports) tend to see a significant benefit. So, at the beginning of a new program, we ask the question, what results should this group of leaders be expected to produce? In other words, we start at the end of the process. Once we have defined the array of expected results, including human, financial, technical, safety, cultural, and customers, the design process goes back to the beginning focuses on a set of interdependent variables. Optimizing the Stickiness of Your Learning and Development Initiatives We use the word stickiness to refer to learning and development that works, that produces an improvement in individual, process, and organizational performance. Stickiness, simply put, is a quality 3 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin
of those organizations in which their investments in learning and development produce an impact on performance. The question arises as to just influence stickiness. The dictionary defines stickiness as a quality of a surface that causes things to adhere to it. So, the issue is: what are the qualities of an organization that cause learning and development to adhere and produce expected performance improvements. We found that to address this question properly, we had to think of the learning and development as a system. Every system has inputs, throughputs and outputs and every system has parts and relationships among the parts. In fact that is what a system is a set of interdependent parts that work together to achieve a purpose. It wasn t until we began to think about and study the problem of stickiness from a systems thinking perspective that we came to an understanding of stickiness. We have found there are six elements of the L&D system that must work in harmony to produce improved leadership effectiveness, defined as getting meaningful business results through others (see model below): 1. Linkage to organizational capability requirements 2. The readiness of individuals and the organization to engage in learning and transformation 3. Creation of experiences that engage learners in relevant development activities. 4. Provision of helping relationships and systemic support that nurture learning over time 5. Opportunities to practice 6. Feedback relative to relevant performance targets 4 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin
Design Let s look at how each of these elements contributes to stickiness. Variable 1: Capability Requirement Getting performance enhancement from your leadership development activities requires that we know what capabilities we need as an organization and what expertise is required to execute these capabilities. Capability refers to what your organization must be able to do to be successful while expertise refers to what it actually can do. Stickiness is an outcome of the degree to which capability (the need) and expertise (what is developed) interact. Ideally every one of your learning and development initiatives will serve to enhance the expertise your organization requires to be successful. What capabilities should the program strengthen? The answer to this question of course What can we actually do? Where are the gaps between what we can do and what we must do? What organizational capabilities are required to lead? (What must we be able to do extremely well? depends on the context in which the organization is operating and the capabilities it requires to be successful in this context. Variable 2: Individual and Organizational Readiness Readiness is multidimensional and comprises both organizational and individual readiness to engage in learning. This readiness is never a given, for learning often flies in the face of existing organizational and individual mindsets. It is an axiom of adult learning that adults learn best when they feel a need to learn. Two elements to readiness: individual and organizational: Awareness Readiness Individuals need to be aware of what their learning needs are and why these are important to the success of the business. Commitment Organizations must be ready to support those who are chosen for development Variable 3: Design and Delivery Design refers to the blueprint for actively engaging participants in the process of learning. Design must specifically link the learning experience to the needs of the business or organization. In addition, after talking to thousands of men and women who were chosen to participate in learning and development activities, every learning activity must link to these needs Delivery must be done in a way that challenges yet motivates self-extension and nurtures commitment and involvement. This means that the experiences in which learners get engaged must simulate those that will be encountered back home at work. Delivery 5 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin
Variable 4: Provision of Systemic Support Learning doesn t end when the L & D activity is over; it just begins. Optimization requires that four kinds of systemic support be available: Many challenging and relevant opportunities for using the new learning must be made available to program participants. These opportunities need to be structured so that they combine both DOING new things and the chance to REFLECT on what one has done. Learning requires on-going support in the form of coaching and mentoring. These are helping relationships that specifically nurture learning. On-going feedback and continuous learning learning requires feedback and learning organization establish feedback rich environment in which learners get a high quantity and quality of informal feedback and the opportunity to use this learning to improve performance. Supportive processes and infrastructures the structures that support and provide input into the L&D system must be in total alignment with the aims of L&D. This would include structures like selection, promotions, performance management, career development, etc. In general these define the organization s talent management processes. Variable 5: Opportunities for Internalization and Integration For a variety of reasons, leadership development is a particularly challenging endeavor. Some of the ways leadership development creates unique [problems for organizations are: Impact across Time and Space - In leadership development, there can be significant time lag between the leader s actions and the impact of those actions. Leveraged Influences - Most leadership definitions include some form of the concept that leaders are responsible for influencing the behaviors of others. Consistent with that definition, the measurements of success need to include assessments on how the behaviors of others have changed. This is a missing step in contemporaneous approaches, where the metrics focus on a simple, linear cause-effect cycle. Systemic Nature of the Leadership Context- The issues that leaders deal with are usually the messy issues. This intense, complex environment Helping Relationsh ips Challengin g Opportuni ties Systemic Factors Supportiv e Systems Feedback precludes success by employing fragmented, piecemeal approaches. The measurement approaches typically employed do not well capture the levels of organizational support needed to bring sustained change in complex environments. Values Thoughts Actions Integration and Change 6 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin
Strategic Value of Leadership - The strategically focused executive will ponder complex questions with no simple answers. These questions are not about the cost; rather, these questions are about the strategic importance of the objective. If we knew the return, then we could ask about the costs. These are profound questions, and most often, executives have to make judgments about the relative strategic value of leadership without the right tools to guide or inform their judgments. The ability to push training participants to reflect, while also giving them real work experiences to apply new approaches and hone their skills, is a valuable combination in emerging markets. There, the gap between urgent must do projects and the availability of capable leaders presents an enormous challenge. In such environments, companies should strive to make every major business project a leadership-development opportunity as well, and to integrate leadership-development components into the projects themselves. Variable 6: Improved leadership effectiveness We frequently find that companies pay lip service to the importance of developing leadership skills but have no evidence to quantify the value of their investment. When businesses fail to track and measure changes in leadership performance over time, they increase the odds that improvement initiatives won t be taken seriously. Part of the problem here relates to the list above relating to the challenges of leadership development: leadership development is only manifested over a significant time dimension and through other people s behavior and performance. This means that during the planning phase of any initiative, it is wide to develop what we call an impact model, which is just a list of the objectives Participants Core Capabilities Core Applications Key Performance (Success) Indicators Participant Goals/Outcomes Business Goals Conclusion In spite of what you read you can obtain a measurable impact from your leadership development efforts. All you have to do is to follow a systematic approach from the first planning session to the finished product improved leadership capacity with discipline and dedication. We know this is true for we have witnessed it on numerous occasions. 7 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin
References 1. Laci Loew and Karen O Leonard, Leadership Development Factbook 2012: Benchmarks and Trends in U.S. Leadership Development, Bersin by Deloitte, July 2012, bersin.com. 2. The State of Human Capital 2012 False Summit: Why the Human Capital Function Still Has Far to Go, a joint report from The Conference Board and McKinsey, October 2012. 3 Matthew Gitsham et al., Developing the Global Leader of Tomorrow, Ashridge Business School, July 2009. 4. Pankaj Ghemawat, Developing global leaders, McKinsey Quarterly, June 2012. 5. Robert Culbertson and Keith Owen, Ph.D. How to maximize the impact of learning and development through evidence based evaluation. Human Resource Planning Society, 2013, Vol. 88, pp. 313 327. 8 Copyright 2014 KS Systems Austin