When I was a boy and we had a disagreement at the dinner table, my mother would often say, “That’s a fact, we don’t have to argue about it, we can look it up.”
Off we would go to our home reference library. If we couldn’t look up said fact there, we called the Reference Desk at the New York Public Library. Dinner waited while we checked our facts.
Leadership development facts
Memories of those days came flooding back when I read Jack Zenger’s excellent piece in Forbes: “Sense and Nonsense in Leadership Development.” I suggest you read it all, but here’s the wisdom kernel.
“The lesson for me is to continually adopt methodologies that have better research to support them, and abandon those that aren’t working as well. But to accomplish this we need to apply a rigorous, research orientation to leadership development.”
In other words, let’s get the facts, then we don’t have to argue about them, we can look them up. Jack draws the comparison with medicine and what’s called “evidence-based medicine.” I’m for that, if we can get good evidence that way. My experience makes me skeptical.
Leadership development research by academics
Most third party research in management and leadership development is done by academics. A whole pile of it is useless. I’m talking about the studies where a few paid college students are given a task no one would perform outside a laboratory and then carefully observed.
Those experiments might advance the greater cause of science, but too many are useless for most working managers today. So what are we to do?
Conduct your own leadership development experiments
While you’re waiting for the academics and consultants and others you can conduct your own experiments. It’s OK. You can do it.
People who do product development and manufacturing do it all the time. What you have to do is learn to design simple experiments and learn from them.
When you do that, you’ll get a bonus. You’ll understand other people’s research better, too.
The academics and big consulting firms will do some of the research, but you should do your own. After all, why should they have all the fun?
