It's time to get serious about leadership development...

Leaders, we need you! Disruption is bringing unprecedented change to the organisational context. Shifting business models, economic instability, political upheaval, rapid innovation, social change, and ubiquitous digital media is rewriting the organisational narrative on a weekly (perhaps daily!) basis. More than ever leadership is required to provide meaning, focus, and resources for individuals, teams, and entire companies to thrive.

There’s just one problem…the quixotic state of leadership development. The simple facts are these: leadership positively impacts a range of organisational outcomes (everything from financial performance to employee engagement) - and leadership development has the potential to enhance the capability required to lead effectively (Fischer and White, 2014). Notice I said ‘the potential to…’?

See, for every well-designed leadership development experience, there are countless others that are versed in little more than the latest conceptual trend and remain divorced from the leader’s context. Worse still, many development programs still treat said leader as some sort of demi-god in search of traits dictated by an outdated ‘great man’ approach. Even more recent style-based approaches are fraught with conceptual overlap, observational bias and a focus on what leaders should do rather than what they actually do (Behrendt et al. 2017).

These content heavy, conceptual programs, tend to espouse the latest leadership theory yet fail to address the leader’s context or what actually happens in practice. If truth be told, leadership is not easy! It’s an increasingly devolved process caught within a myriad of systemic drivers. And herein lies our opportunity: to create development experiences that are ground in the context that the individual operates in. As L&D professionals we can help create leadership development that increases capability and impacts organisational outcomes …but a cookie-cutter approach isn’t going to do it.

So what can we do about it?

Make it real: We need to create development experiences aligned to the strategic intent of the organisation. Your organisational focus, whether it be growth, efficiency, innovation etc, should dictate the focus of your leadership program. Solid conversations about organisational strategy, both current and future, are needed here. An organisational model of leadership can also help, but a word of caution – this must be an agile, evolving, and evidence-based model if it’s to stand up to scrutiny and continue to drive value-adding behaviour.

Make it part of, rather than divorced from daily work: Why spend three days discussing the merit of a particular leadership style if the most critical challenge in the organisation is driving a culture of innovation, or ensuring strategic alignment among executive teams? Focus on the behaviours required to respond to your strategic challenges. Work on developing and executing leadership projects as part of the actual development experience and provide time for reflective practice. Styles might be interesting but there’s a reason a new style based theory or instrument arrives on the market with increasing frequency.

In it for the long term: Leadership development must move way beyond the traditional three-day event and far more to being a long-term work-based intervention. Self-reflection, challenging long-standing assumptions, and support are critical to seeing the shifts in behaviour that are often required. Make your leadership journey a multimodal long-term experience tied to critical challenges.