Leadership development talking and doing
Leadership development may be the most important thing that a company does. The problem seems to be that no one is doing much. Jason Geller’s “How To Create A Leadership Development Program That Actually Works” sings a song we hear a lot.
“But while many organizations recognize the importance of leadership development, our research shows that 42% of chief experience officers surveyed aren’t making this a priority.”
In other words, everybody talks about leadership development, but hardly anyone does anything.
Why don’t we just do it?
In 2008, David Maister wrote one of the very best books on strategy with one of the very best titles ever: Strategy and the Fat Smoker. What he said about strategy in that book applies just as much to leadership development.
“The primary reason we do not work at behaviors which we know we need to improve is that the rewards (and pleasure) are in the future; the disruption, discomfort and discipline needed to get there are immediate.”
Not only that, the work isn’t very glamorous. You get far better press by bringing in a marquee name outsider after conducting “a nationwide search for the best candidate.” Fighting a fire heroically is more glamorous that doing fire prevention.
Talking about leadership development is not enough
That’s not the entire reason why we talk about leadership development but don’t do much. According to Bob Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer in their book, The Knowing-Doing Gap:
“One of the main barriers to turning knowledge into action is the tendency to treat talking about something as equivalent to actually doing something about it.”
That brings us around to today’s challenge. Stop just talking about leadership development and start doing something about it.
