Leadership development happens mostly on the job
Charles Jennings wrote a marvelous post titled “Workplace Performance: 70:20:10 – Above All Else It’s a Change Agent” that includes many insights and pointers to other work. Here’s the first bit that caught my eye.
“The evidence, however, does point to the fact that most learning is experiential and social, and most of that being carried out in a self-directed way. In other words, ‘informally’. It also points to some broad – rather than specific – ratios.”
That’s what that 70-20-10 concept is all about. The percentages may vary from study to study and person to person, but the fact is that we learn about leadership mostly on the job and very little from books and classes and other planned events.
How can we make that development better?
The other key point of Charles’ post is captured by this paragraph.
“70:20:10 is primarily an agent of change for extending our thinking about learning beyond the classroom and other structured, event-based development activities.”
If you want to control the leadership development process in your company, all of this is bad news. We know that leadership development happens informally and on the job. That makes it almost impossible to control. Not only that, spending time trying to control the process can be counterproductive.
The good news is that if you can bring yourself to let go of the need for control you will probably improve the quality of your leadership development. Most human endeavors are more productive and faster when people have the resources they need and the freedom to choose what to do.
So, instead of controlling, set about blowing up the bottlenecks. Instead of putting effort and energy into planned events, set about providing knowledge of and access to more resources.
