Julie Winkle Giulioni isn’t suggesting that developing leaders is a bad idea. She’s asking if a small shift in thought and language would make things better. Here’s the money quote.
“Leadership development in many organizations is a function, a set of processes and activities aimed at turning out cadre after cadre of ready, willing and able individuals who’ll keep the business running. It’s a well-oiled machine that operates on metrics and margins. It generally espouses a global set of competencies or capacities that all leaders must learn and master – all in service of the needs of the business.
Leader development, on the other hand, is personal. The focus is not on building organizational capability by generating what some might interpret as an undifferentiated pool of talent; rather, it’s about growing the individual in unique ways that complement their strengths, talents, and interests. It also targets key areas for improvement that will support the leader as well as the business.”
Jon Ingham suggests something similar in his post “The need for people centricity in learning.” Here’s a key quote from that post:
“I would suggest that we do not in fact just need people to learn at certain points in a process, we need them to be searching for, reflecting on and taking action against learning opportunities wherever these present themselves.”
Leadership development is changing
I don’t know if we’ll change the name of what we now call “leadership development.” But I think that what we do will change as our practice catches up with the realities of the world and the workplace.
We’re not in the stable Industrial Age any longer, when executives could reasonably play fifteen to twenty years out. Back then, we could treat people as “parts” that could be plugged into slots that didn’t change much from decade to decade. No more.
In that world, it made sense to concentrate on “training,” formal, designed programs. Today, thinking about facilitating learning makes more sense. And we expect that most people will learn 70 percent of what they learn, not in programs, but in the workflow.
It only makes sense that leadership development will change. The question is, “Will we change what we call it?”
