Jack Zenger recently wrote another of his excellent columns for Forbes. The title is “Why Leadership Development Doesn’t Change Some People (And How To Turn Them Around).” As usual, the entire piece is worth reading, but there were two comments that flipped my thinking switch.
Leadership development isn’t about perfection
Jack says that many company executives are happy with improvement from 60 percent of the people who receive assessments, coaching, and training. Jack isn’t happy, though. Here’s why.
“Why does this bother me so greatly? First, the company made the development available because they expected that it would help the organization’s performance improve. They anticipated that employee engagement would go up, retention of employees would improve, productivity would increase and customer satisfaction would get better. The positive results they obtained came from the 60% of the participants who are carrying all of the additional load. Think what would happen if 90% percent of participants had changed.â€
We should chase perfection because that’s how we’ll catch excellence, as Vince Lombardi told us. The problem is that we pursue those growth opportunities more at some times than other, at least that’s how it was for me. When I reflect on my career, I realize that there were times when I seized opportunities and worked hard to exploit them. But there were other times when either because of motivation or situation I wasn’t a willing learner.
Leadership development isn’t for everyone
Here’s the continuation of Jack’s earlier comment.
“The second discouraging element is that organizations conduct development to help individual leaders become more effective. They want to propel their careers, to have them enjoy work more and to feel the exhilaration of moving forward, versus standing still. But 40% of their participants blew the opportunity off.â€
Yes, 40 percent of the participants didn’t improve. Maybe that was a temporary situation and maybe they’ll perform better on the next go around. Or, maybe they’re among the people who aren’t really good leadership development material. Some people look like high potential leadership material until they run up against the realities of the work.
When reality strikes, those people may discover that they don’t like being evaluated based on other people’s performance. Some others don’t want to invest the energy or have the difficult discussions or make the decisions that leadership entails. When that’s the case you’re far better off helping them find work that they love and giving someone else their leadership development opportunity.
