Culture of Leadership Excellence

A sustainable, exponential growth strategy

If you say that that quality of leadership is important for an organization, people tend to agree.

However, if we say that organizations outperform their competition and deliver exceptional results over a sustained period of time because of leadership, not many may agree. ‘ The fellow is overstating things‘ is likely to be the response.

Truth, simple as it always is, is - inspiring leaders have inspired employees who in turn deliver inspired performance.

Take at a look at some of the available evidence.

A.?The seminal work, Good to Great by Jim Collins was based on the study of more than 1435 organizations. Only 11 companies made the cut as ‘great companies’ and a key factor was leadership.

B.??Shannon Mullen O’ Keefe and Vibhas Ratanji? Gallup , September 2020) in their article place leadership and communication right at the top, as the driver of high-performance culture.

C.???? Consulting organizations based on their own experience and review of organizational research ( Summit Leadership Partners , Dynamic Achievement Solutions, LLC ) attribute leadership as a key factor of organizational performance.

And there are many more.

Not that the idea of leadership being critical for organizational performance is lost on people who understand this field. Possibly, that is why there is such a high level of investment on leadership development. Globally, the investment on leadership development was in the excess of ?$ 6O billion in 2021. ( Ayse Yemiscigil, Dana Born, and?Horace Ling , Harvard Business Review , February 2023)

Unfortunately, the challenge lies in ?the VERY LOW if at all, ?impact of these efforts on the quality of leadership in a sustainable manner, as borne out by the studies. Here are a couple of them:

DDI | Development Dimensions International 's global forecast on leadership covering 13,695 leaders across 1556 organizations has placed ‘development of next generation of leaders’ as one of the top worries of CEOs.

The level of employee engagement globally and in India, (a consequence of quality of leadership as brought out repeatedly in Gallup’s research for decades), not improving significantly, also bears testimony to it.

However, reasons for this state of affairs are not far to seek. A close look at the leadership development efforts throws up many critical, missing pieces in the puzzle:

1.???? Induction of people in leadership roles, from within or from outside: Still driven by the functional competence / performance, with little or no regard for the leadership mindset / skills. As we know by now, we may be able to build some skills after placing someone in a leadership role, mindset change is hard and a long drawn effort.

?This practice needs to change if development efforts have to produce results and we have to have leadership excellence across levels.

2.?Focus on domain skills development: Whether classroom or on-the-job learning / mentoring, the focus at junior and middle levels remains on functional competence. This adversely impacts the leadership bench in an organization. And then, from the same pool, we promote people to senior leadership roles. This in turn dents leadership development efforts as employees cannot see many leadership role models to emulate.

3.??Program design / delivery: Large majority of the programs remain primarily classroom based, with little or no on-the-job learning / application. Transfer of learning is therefore, a challenge.

What we need is individualized, blended learning approach with much greater focus on experiential learning and application and? on the job, with review / acknowledgement of the desired behavioural change.

Real impact of leadership development effort comes when the desired behavioural changes are internalized.

4.???? Not part of a cultural change: It’s established by that behavioural changes are not sustainable unless reinforced over a period of time. Treating leadership development as an individual learning efforts will therefore, not suffice. It has to be taken up as a part of culture change in the organization, driven by the CEO himself. The management reviews and HR processes have to have leadership competencies / effectiveness and employee engagement have to be important part of the metrics to evaluate / recognize / promote managers / leaders.?

An employee’s experience in an organization - whether inspiring or frustrating, is largely determined by its managers / leaders. If employees have engaging and inspiring experience, high performance and retention are natural outcomes, as the evidence has shown.

The organizations that want to leverage this strategy of leadership excellence will need to take a 360 degree view of leadership development. Investment alone will not do.

What do you say?

#leadership #leadershipdevelopment #leaders #managers #highperformanceculture