3 Missing Ingredients in Most Leadership Development Efforts
Leadership development has grown into a $360+ billion industry globally. Yet, according to a study quoted in the Harvard Business Review, the majority of efforts fail to yield anywhere near the results implied by such huge revenues and investments.
The HBR article offers a tentative explanation for this strange phenomenon, namely that “corporations [have been] victims of the great training robbery.” The article elaborates on this point by stating that “American companies spend enormous amounts of money on employee training and education […] but they are not getting a good return on their investment. For the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things.”
Based on decades of leadership experience, I can only say: I’m not at all surprised! During my career—both as a leader and as one being led—I have seen far too many false starts and ill-fated attempts at training and development as a result of organizations merely going through the motions to check a box. I have also seen well-intentioned leaders do everything they know to do, with the best of intentions to develop leadership capability in their people, only to see little to no sustainable behavior changes or shifts in their results.
Based on current trends, it seems almost as if training and development are doomed to forever be a futile waste of time and money. Even worse, the lack of return on investment will go on to perpetuate a self-fulfilling prophecy and vicious cycle where training and development don’t deliver results, resulting in less investment in such efforts, leading to further lackluster results, and so on. Let me assure you, however, that things don’t have to be this way!
The good news is that the solution, in many cases, does not require a major overhaul of existing programs. Traditional leadership development can be useful in many ways as long as it is delivered and received in the right context. Based on my experience leading countless successful leadership development and culture transformation efforts, that proper context has the 3 key characteristics that I am going briefly explain in this article.
1. Leadership Development must be done in the context of accomplishing something extraordinary.
"People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things."
- Edmund Hillary
The metaphor I’d like to use to explain what I mean is the distinction between general fitness and training to win the gold medal in a particular sport. While there are fundamental fitness strategies that everyone would benefit from, when an Olympic athlete sets out to win a gold medal, they don’t just aimlessly work out. They focus on developing specific skills and gaining strength in very specific ways that serve them in achieving their specific goal. Leadership development works the same way. While everyone would benefit from developing a set of fundamental skills, breakthroughs can only be achieved when the person sets their sights on achieving something extraordinary. It is only then that they will be most effective at developing themselves into the kind of person who can achieve those goals.
This is the framework in which I conduct all of my leadership development and culture transformation work, both for organizations and individuals, and it has been phenomenally successful in every industry and locality in which it has been implemented, all over the world. If you’re curious about this approach and interested in taking it for a test drive yourself, I encourage you to check out our newly released e-course “Unlocking Your Transformative Potential.”
2. Tools and skills are necessary, but the secret to making them work for you is in understanding what’s in the way of putting them to use…and then getting it out of the way!
Informative training – that is mastery of relevant tools and skills – is a necessary step in becoming an effective leader, but it is not sufficient. Transformative training – discovering what is in the way of progress and learning how to move it out of the way – is what’s needed if one aims to get the most out of those tools and skills and become a truly transformative leader. In the video below, I introduce a simple metaphor of driving on the highway to demonstrate how the “Hidden Saboteurs of Success and Fulfillment” work against us as long as we remain unaware of them, and how awareness alone is often all it takes for us to dramatically improve our performance.
If this resonates with you and you believe you, or your organization, could benefit from adopting this approach to training and development, I would urge you to check out our soon-to-be-released e-course “Discovering the Transformative Leader Within.” This e-course represents the first time the content of one of my most popular workshops for private clients has been made available to the public, and we are very excited about individuals and teams being able to complete the powerful experience at their own pace.
3. Leadership development must start with the individual adopting the mindset that they are fully committed to a purpose greater than themselves.
“I am the one and It’s not about me!” – Amir Ghannad
When a leader takes full responsibility for the results they are committed to delivering, AND they get that their efforts or their results are not about them, only then are they able to discover the Transformative Leader within. It is through mastery of this paradox and constantly practicing the right balance of what Jim Collins refers to as “professional tenacity and personal humility” that leaders become the best version of themselves.
The leadership development programs that we conduct at The Ghannad Group are designed to create holistic experiences for our participants, but as I mentioned earlier, your existing programs can also be transformed if you evaluate them against the characteristics described above and make the necessary adjustments. If that sounds like something you would be interested in pursuing, I have some guidance below.
Ask yourself the following questions and act on the answers:
Do we do leadership training and coaching in hopes that it will pay off someday, or are we intentional about persuading the participants to practice what they learn in the course of delivering extraordinary results?
Do we only arm people with tools and skills, or do we also engage them in the practice of developing self-awareness so they can see what is holding them back from being the best versions of themselves as leaders?
What are we doing to cultivate the right mindset in leaders such that they are willing and able to accept the personal accountability of being a leader and yet not make everything mean something about themselves?
If you’d like to take on the challenge of overhauling your existing leadership development programs or just starting fresh from the ground up, or if you simply just don’t know where to start, feel free to reach out to me and I’d be more than happy to offer my perspective based on over 3 decades of experience. Simply comment on this post, send me a direct message or email me at amir@theghannadgroup.com.