“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Alvin Toffler
How prevalent are poor leaders and what do we do about it? We all know that poor leadership is rampant in most organizations. We also know that most commonly, leadership development is viewed as the cure.
To stimulate research on poor leadership, Robert Hogan in 1990 suggested that the base rate of leadership incompetence was between 60 and 75 percent. Additional research also suggests that one out of two executive leaders fail at some point in their career. And according to a recent survey by Badbossology.com and Development Dimensions International (DDI) a majority of employees spend 10 or more hours per month complaining or listening to others complain about bad bosses—and almost one-third spend 20 hours or more per month.
Jeffrey C. Pfeffer, Ph.D., professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University has been quoted as saying “If we practiced medicine like we practice management–based on hunch, intuition and ideology–we would have much more malpractice and a lot of mortality and morbidity.” The same seems particularly true of leadership development programs where actual learning, transfer back to the work environment and enhanced performance is more myth than reality.
In fact, Marshall Goldsmith reviewed how well 86,000 leadership training participants actually learned from the experience. He found that the people who went home, talked about the learning and worked deliberately to implement new behaviors learned best. But those who just went back home and did no follow–up showed no improvement at all.
The sad fact is that we know how to do solid leadership development–we’re just not doing it. Most companies spend their time and money on the training and forget about the actual learning and practice that is required to develop new skills. That’s up to the individual, but companies typically don’t even bother to create and share learning expectations or follow up to see whether a leader is using what he or she was taught. Few companies ever evaluate whether their leadership development efforts work and even fewer provide tools to hold learners accountable for creating and tracking professional development plans.  And we wonder why most leadership development efforts are typically ineffective.
Here are some things your company should consider:
Make it More Than an Event
Cooking together or rafting down a river makes for a fun interaction. Few of these experiences teach leadership skills that are of practical value to the organization. Link the leadership development intervention to an ongoing process involving the participant’s manager and a mechanism to ensure that developmental plans are tracked and monitored following leadership training.
Consider Different Learning Styles
In my have seen hundreds of people read books and learn nothing. Not everyone learns the same way. Consider blended learning approaches to ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity reflect, learn and apply information and skills.
Avoid Case Study Overload
Leadership development that is predominantly using a case study approach may stimulate problem solving and analysis but it certainly won’t teach leadership skills. Leadership development is about enhancing specific skills and behaviors—you can do case studies all day and not be more competent in what leaders actually are required to do all day.
Practice
Essentially, training is intended to help people develop new habits and enhance effectiveness in specific skills. In order to do so, repetition is important. Also, it is important to allow time to develop and integrate the new habit in one’s daily routine. A week long leadership program is unlikely to lead to the formation of new habits. Initiating behavior change is hard and sustaining it over time is even more challenging.
Evaluate Your Program
It’s great that the leadership participants liked the facilitator and material. More important is whether anyone notices actual behavior change after the leader leaves the training. If you have to use “happy face†evaluations, at least use a “post-then†approach to enhance the validity of your subjective evaluations. Never heard of “post-then†evaluations? That’s one of the reasons evaluations of leadership development programs are weak or never go beyond “level 1†approaches.
Hold Participant’s Manager Accountable to be a Coach
If the participant’s manager isn’t involved in the leadership initiative then you have a weak program. Managers of program participants minimally need to share the purpose and goals of the program, clarify expectations and hold the participant accountable to put to together a learning development plan to apply and practice one or more skills taught in the program.
Seek Mentoring and Coaching for Program Participants
Peer coaching and/or mentoring can be incredibly valuable to amplify and accelerate learning from leadership development efforts. Assigning a peer coach from the program or organizational mentor for each participant can be useful to continue skill practice and discussion outside of the leadership program.
Provide Organizational Problems as Projects
Experience is the best teacher. Provide actual organizational problems for leaders to solve in small or large groups as part of your leadership development effort. The transfer of learning is stronger than abstract concepts or case studies so commonly used in most leadership training programs.
Help Executives See Themselves Accurately
We have published research supporting the concept that most leaders have inflated views of their strengths. Incorporate multi-rater or 360 degree feedback assessments in your leadership development efforts to help leaders compare self-perceptions to those of other key internal and external stakeholders. Emphasize the strengths of leaders and encourage behavioral action plans following feedback.
Make it Competency Based
Leadership development is most effective when it targets specific competencies that will result in a culture that engages and retains talent (e.g., emotional intelligence). Leadership development training is more effective when these competencies reinforce the organization’s vision and values.
Focus on Interpersonal Competence
Leadership is about relationship intelligence. Leaders don’t fail because of a lack of technical knowledge or experience—they derail because they lack interpersonal competence. Leaders are both born and made so select those with innate talent and create experiences to encourage repetitive practice to sharpen the skills of the others.
Focus on Health
Daniel Goleman suggests that 50% to 70% of the culture of a team or organization is directly attributed to the leader’s behavior. Our own research suggests that leaders play the strongest role in creating a psychologically healthy climate. But, it all starts with leaders who have a balance in life and manage emotions and stress in a positive manner. Driven “Type A†leaders get a lot done but they either breakdown themselves or drive others out of the organization. Effective leadership development training programs should also be integrated with executive health and wellness.
As Harry Truman said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts”….Be well…
[tags]ken nowack, envisia learning, executive development, management development, supervisory training, organizational development, leadership training, OD [/tags]
Ken Nowack
Kenneth Nowack, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist (PSY13758) and President & Chief Research Officer/Co-Founder of Envisia Learning, is a member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Ken also serves as the Associate Editor of Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research. His recent book Clueless: Coaching People Who Just Don’t Get It is available for free for a limited time by signing up for free blog updates (Learn more at our website)
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Stacey Derbinshire
The points you make in your article are noteworthy. Your title would be better if the word training was substitute for development. Most training does not work because it does not provide opportunities for practice and reinforcement. Development is to improve existing skills.
Additionally, I do disagree about your comment specific to competencies. Whose competencies? Senior management? The CEO? A purchased assessment?
For my clients, we begin by defining the desired results and then using people’s natural strengths to get those results through a proven process.
Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best business blog posts of the week in my Three Star Leadership Midweek Review of the Business Blogs. Where I said: “As usual, Dr. Nowack has got thoughtful, informed and helpful things to say.”
http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2008/04/02/4208-a-midweek-look-at-the-business-blogs.aspx
if you’re interested in the thinking of Daniel Goleman, there is an interesting dialogue series called “Wired to Connect” where Goleman speaks to leading thinkers about the applications of emotional/social intelligence. You can listen to samples of these conversations at http://www.morethansound.net
Ken,
Thank you for your well written article. Your points make sense and they are the core principles behind my development processes.
That being said, there is a time and place for training events. I have found that there is a need and desire for groups to go through training events as a way to learn a few new skills, have fun and create a memorable team experience. Many of these types of events can be found on a terrific training site http://www.teambuildinginc.com.
I do believe that long term development comes in the form of a process which does include assessments, behavior profiles, training programs and process with reinforcement, performance coaching… Organization spend millions of dollars on training that does not work. If well designed processes are used to develop leaders, training will become an investment that will yields a tremendous return as opposed to an expense.
Jeff Backal – http://www.teambuildersplus.com
Leadership
Senior health managers talk of the importance of good leadership and the need for training to support their managers, but are they right? Can we teach leadership? So often we see money thrown down the drain as manager’s return unable to implement the learning’s from the courses attended. So what makes a good leader? Traditional theory related leadership to IQ supported by academic achievements and the prestigious facilities attended, all contributing to a great C.V. But what good is a certificate on a wall if the person lacks the ability to apply into practice. Contemporary views are that leaders require emotional intelligence, the ability to engender excitement and motivation of a team, to self regulate and have self awareness, to have social skills that entice desired responses and the ability to be empathetic of those around you (Goleman 1998). Interestingly an American study identified that over half of employee’s lacked motivation to keep learning and improving in the job, (Harris Education Research Council, New York 1991), certainly a consideration when investing in our health managers. We should explore the personal motivations and drivers with our managers prior to venturing a fruitless road of training for a more cost effective strategy.
Charles Handy (1999) describes organisations as being “full of fascinating people†he goes on to describe the challenge as how to make them productive communities. Stephen Covey (2005) describes, that since his published book in 1989 “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People†the world has profoundly changed. Our lives more complex, relationships with family, friends and work are significantly different, I think most would agree. I feel we can further add to Handys suggestion that organisations are now full of even more fascinating and complex people. Coveys more recent publication “The 8th Habit†not an additional habit more complimentary of the existing 7 Habits is about the central challenge of the new Knowledge Worker Age. Covey describes the 8th Habit as the voice of the human spirit, full of hope and intelligence, resilient by nature, boundless in its potential to serve a common good, this voice being the soul of organisations.
Covey states, “human beings are not things needing to be motivated and controlled, they are 4 dimensional – body, mind, spirit and heartâ€. Our organisations leaders must be able to inspire people to see their own ability to be able to make choices. When reflecting on motivation as one of the major factors of an emotionally intelligent person, if we do not offer opportunity for motivation or empowerment as people we will be unfulfilled and unsatisfied. This is then critical for health care leaders to draw out the greatest talent, initiative and creativity to ensure our staff is fulfilled as people and in doing so we create a dynamic community and engender a sense of belonging. For the health leaders out there who made the choice to lead we must care for our people and in return our people will work with us to make our organisations a better place.
Caron Hill Director Leadership Advantage
Enjoy your blog