Leadership Development is a High-Risk Investment

You know you need to do it, but you are hesitant. You’re looking at the baby in the bathwater, and wondering if you shouldn’t just chuck out the whole lot and forget about it.

It’s costly, and risky, you think.

The cost lies not in what you pay for the development (although it can sometimes be steep, especially those stints at foreign universities where dollar or euro is the currency), but in the risk of the development being unsuccessful or underwhelming.

It costs you a lot to take those leaders out of their work, for whatever period of time. It costs you a pocketful to fly them around and put them up in hotels.

And, if the leadership development does not succeed, it costs you a lot in goodwill and the willingness of leaders to embark on future development processes. The HR/OD/Leadership Development brand in the organisation suffers.

Moreover, no executive leader wants to carry the risk of having implemented an unsuccessful leadership development initiative. There’s probably a difficult sponsor chat ahead.

Now, why are you still thinking of investing time, money and energy in the development of the leaders of your organisation? 

Do you see leadership as a critical organisational capability for succeeding in your world? Is it necessary to build a good leadership pipeline, so that you do not have to bring in leaders from outside the organisation, who then still need to learn your business? Do you need deeper leadership, so that employees closer to the frontline can make critical decisions in a congruent way?

Are you going through a major transformation, and need your leaders to lead into the same direction, speaking the same language, and displaying the same leadership behaviours? Transformations are fundamentally disruptive, and a lack of clarity and direction can make the organisation stall and falter.

Do new managers struggle to come to grips with the new role? Leading teams and managing people is a different discipline from that of technical expertise. Many new managers find it hard to understand that it is now longer their own technical work that matters, but how they are able to shape the performance of others.

Are there specific, individual leaders in your business who are not performing to expectation? There may be many reasons for leadership underperformance, from a lack of focus and clarity about their role, to deficient leadership and management knowledge and skills, to burn-out and fatigue. How do you understand and address the issue of individual competence and performance?

Have you done “leadership and management development before, and the results were underwhelming? The leadership and management development was so generic, on the one hand, and so theoretical and disconnected from practice, on the other hand, that it made no difference to leadership performance.

I’d love to know why you consider embarking on a leadership development intervention or initiative, large or small, and what you hope to achieve. I’d also love to know what makes you hesitant, and what the constraints on leadership and management development are in your organisation.

For more information about WVA’s leadership and management development offerings, click here.