It was only my first day at work, but I could already tell that my boss wasn’t happy to see me.
I had been hired by an organization to help improve their leadership development (LD) programs. On my first day, I was asked to meet with a senior executive who would oversee my work.
The executive started our meeting by telling me it wasn’t his idea to hire me, and he didn’t believe LD worked. He told me straight out that he only hired me to “check a box,” as requested by his superiors.
As you can imagine, I didn’t enjoy being told on my very first day that I was a checked box. And yet, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t understand where his disdain was coming from.
Outside the silo of human resources, there is skepticism about the value of LD.
Profit center leaders, in particular, don’t always believe that LD gives a sufficient ROI to justify the time and money invested. And even though I would disagree to some extent on the payoff, I’ll admit that a lot of LD simply does not produce tangible, positive results.
You can see the evidence of this failure in macro workforce trends.
In general, employee engagement and trust are down, while stress and attrition continue to rise.
Although a myriad of factors impact these critical metrics, poor leadership must take more than its fair share of blame.
People leaders largely determine whether employees are happy, engaged, and productive in their jobs. A good leader can help teams go from good to great; poor or toxic leaders can erode all trust in an organization.
LD is supposed to be an antidote for all these problems, so why is it struggling to achieve its primary goals?
The failure is shared by buyers and sellers.
A good part of the problem is that many of the firms and schools offering LD programs make little or no effort to measure their impact on actual performance, largely because the people buying the programs aren’t demanding proof that they’re actually changing leadership behaviors.
A 2023 study by researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management found that LD programs at leading business schools were often designed without mechanisms to measure leader performance. Nearly three quarters (70%) of business school respondents said they “settle for positive reactions” from clients rather than performance metrics showing that their solutions had an impact.
As for the consumers of these programs, the Sloan survey contacted 46 HR executives and found “their selection of LDPs (leadership development programs) is seldom guided by evidence of effectiveness.” Instead, the survey revealed, they buy based on the “look” of the consulting firm’s website.
As one executive noted, "leadership development decisions seem to resemble the online dating industry, where swiping left or right is based more on appearance than substance,” the study’s authors concluded.
With an approach like that, it’s hardly surprising that so many organizations that invest in LD are still unhappy with the performance of their leaders.
Instead of development focused on the specific leadership needs of an organization and individual leaders, we get generic “sheep-dip” seminars, where large numbers of leaders are brought together and given a generic list of skills and mindsets they need to adopt.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
There are solutions available that have a laser-like focus on performance and can help you build long-term accountability measures to ensure leaders remain faithful to new behaviors.
But it’s going to be a bit tricky to find the schools or firms that are willing to do the hard work of designing a solution that fits your organization’s needs.
How do you make a good investment in LD?
I think there are four key questions to ask any LD partner before writing a check. These questions will quickly establish if you are buying something that is fit for your organization’s purpose, or simply deploying a “chicken-soup” solution that makes your leaders feel good for a few days but doesn’t lead to long-term behavior change.
- Will your partner take time to identify exactly what it is you need to “fix”? What you think you need to fix in your leadership culture may not be the biggest area of need. Beware LD firms that spend all their energy telling you the problems your leaders are facing. Look for firms that take the time to investigate and identify the leadership needs before prescribing a leadership solution.
- Are you being promised a “bespoke” solution but getting something off-the-shelf that has been tweaked to appear customized? Far too many LD firms will offer you boilerplate solutions with little or no effort to emphasize the leadership behaviors most needed in your organization. Dig deep into Request for Proposal (RFP) presentations and look for the telltale signs that you’re getting a retread solution and not something built for your purpose.
- Is steady reinforcement built into the solution? To create fluency and competency in new leadership skills, leaders need constant feedback and reinforcement for everything they learn. This must involve supporting leaders as they go through their learning journey and building in regular sessions to bolster and emphasize the need to keep applying new skills.
- Does your partner have a mature process for measuring improved performance? Far too many off-the-shelf leadership solutions avoid the whole challenge of measuring changed behaviors and performance. The best partner firms will give you a range of options to measure the effectiveness of the leadership training and the impact it’s having on teams.
LD can be a great investment, but only if you take the time to find the right solution and commit to a rigorous course of assessment.
Otherwise, you’re just checking boxes and wasting a ton of money in the process. In my next article, I’ll be discussing some of the steps needed to create an effective Performance-Based Leadership (PBL®) solution.
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