Five Advances in Leadership Development
It's holiday time and I've been inspired by the Alps. My colleague, Anton Fishman, sent me a McKinsey article about good practice in leadership development... so, I thought I'd share it.. and, in doing so, let you know about The New Business School, launching in the Autumn.
McKinsey: Experiential Learning
It's good to see McKinsey advocate experiential learning - see link below.
When leaders gain knowledge from their own, direct experience, their insight seems more valid, robust and likely to last. As McKinsey say, experiential learning deserves a central place in the development of corporate capability.
Experiential Learning and The New Business School
For the same reason, experiential learning is a key feature of The New Business School. But experiential learning alone, is not good enough.
In the same way that David Brailsford (British Cycling and Team Sky) attributes his Olympic and Tour de France success to 'the aggregation of marginal gains' (the competitive advantage achieved by combining many smaller improvements so as to deliver outstanding results), leadership development can deliver far more business impact when it combines a number of very effective practices.
Here are some examples:
Learning as a Leadership Team
Across the realm of human endeavour, teams that need to perform together, learn together - except in the corporate world. Strangely, in their drive to succeed, leaders who need to perform together, learn alone.
It's a huge performance gap. To address it, The New Business School only delivers executive development for leadership teams.
Self-Directed Performance Improvement
Self-directed learning has big advantages over expert-led tuition. Yet, with the exception of most executive coaching, leadership development hangs on to tutor-centred learning methods.
Development is far more effective when leaders define their own purpose, set questions for their own inquiry, choose the improvements they want to make and reflect critically on their own performance.
It increases engagement, ownership and implementation. That's why it works.
The Potential of Learning Power
Learning used to be something to do on a course. But in a digital world, leaders have to learn and perform in the moment, at the same time.
While there's a common language for leadership, the language for learning is still in its infancy. Learning Power can fill that gap. It's a robust, research-validated model of learning. It equips leaders with the potential to learn and improve just about anything. And help their teams do the same.
The Ubiquity of Leadership Voice
Everything people do, everything leaders do, takes place through their voice, in their written and spoken word. Yet, the improvement of leadership voice is a marginal activity.
Language is the medium of leadership: vocabulary, conversation, email, meeting, story, announcement, conference call.... We're in it and hardly notice.
Using your voice is as central to leadership as kicking a ball is to soccer. Surely, it's time practice?
Five Advances in Leadership Development
It's hard to break free from the drag of old habits. But here are five advances in leadership development that corporate organisations should surely embrace:
- Experiential learning, executive development as a leadership team, self-directed improvement, the development of learning power and the refinement of leadership voice.
Each of these is an untapped source of performance advantage with a strong case for a more central role in leadership development
Bringing it Together: The New Business School
To leverage the aggregation of marginal gains from all these advances together, The New Business School will provide executive development for leadership teams that includes them all.
Please Get in Touch
It's due to launch in a few weeks time, but if you'd like to express an interest now, please get in touch
And here's a link to the McKinsey article: https://bit.ly/1L6VAhO