Leadership Development: Why organisations should stop building diamond mines?

Recently, I was reflecting on some of the absolutely wonderful work-related conversations I've had with colleagues over the years that have impacted me no end. This got me thinking. It got me thinking about how organisations could approach learning differently. And how much time I used to spend, as a so-called learning professional, creating 'learning objectives' and building courses around leadership development. 

I would create inordinate amounts of work for myself, detailing 'knowledge to be gained', key ideas to be transmitted (in typical instructional design style). Or we might look to buy in expensive 'off-the-shelf' compliance training (health & safety, data protection etc.), which made very little difference to the way participants actually behaved on the job, or how they thought about risk-related issues. 

But more importantly we didn’t spend enough time seeking to understand people's everyday challenges, and providing opportunities for people to explore their own day-to-day concerns themselves and in conversation with others.  

Why is this important? Well perhaps I can illustrate what I mean by sharing a story, one which we cited often during my time at City Year UK (the actual author isn’t known, it was adapted from “The Parable of the Pebbles", coming to us by way of the late John Sarvey):

There was this pilot who flew all over the world to interesting lands, meeting interesting people. One night the engine of her plane suddenly stalled. Amazingly, she was able to eject from the plane and parachute to the ground.

The pilot had no idea where she was, and no idea where the closest village or human habitation was located. She soon realised that if she just stayed still, she would surely die. So she started walking.

Mile after mile she walked. No sooner had she fallen to the ground, completely drained of energy, than a vision appeared before her. It was a genie. And the genie spoke: “I will only say this once. Do not despair. Do not give up hope. Just listen and do as I say and you will survive. In the end, you will be both happy and sad. But first, reach down and pick up some sand. Heed my words and continue on.”

The genie disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. It must have been a mirage, thought the pilot. Nevertheless it brought her a new sense of energy and hope.

 So she reached down and picked up a handful of sand and continued on. Mile after mile, she went on, collecting sand. However, the heat, the dryness and the little critters were beginning to take a heavy toil on her. So finally she reached the point where she could go on no more; at the top of a dune, she fell and tumbled down the other side, stumbling upon a village in an oasis. The local natives, seeing that she was shattered, came out to help her. She had made it!

But now that she was replenished, her thoughts drifted back to the mysterious vision from the night before. She reached into her pocket to pull out the sand. To her great surprise the sand had turned to diamonds.

As she thought back to the words of the genie, a smile crossed her face: “In the end you will be both happy and sad.” Yes, she was happy. She had survived. And she had a handful of diamonds. Yet she was sad, because she had not picked up more sand.

I think there's much in this story that is applicable to life in general of course, but also specifically learning and development, and how we develop 'leadership'.

Writers and philosophers of the past, have described life as a quest-like journey: Dante's Divine Comedy; Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Marcel's Homo Viator. And employees, like the pilot in the story, are on their own ‘journey in the desert’: their workplace experiences like the sand which the pilot collected and, over time, turned into diamonds. 

For employees, this diamond forming process comprises not of Sun and sand dunes of course, but ‘on the job’ challenges typical to their role: high-pressure tasks or difficult colleagues. These stretch us, and over time, they shape who we are providing us with priceless experiences. In other words, the story is a reminder that most of what we learn at work, we learn 'on the job' (expressed elsewhere in the form of 70:20:10).

And so what?

Well, the moral here is that don’t have to go far to find the ‘raw materials’ we need to develop our employees. Organisations and their training academies are often lured into constructing what amounts to massive ‘diamond mines’ - expensive courses, events or elearning programmes, attempting to transfer knowledge. The thinking being that these courses in themselves constitute leadership development. Instead, as aforementioned, it's the 'on-the-job' experiences themselves which we need to 'mine' - beginning by collecting the 'sand'.

No sand. No diamonds.

Well what does this look like? How can we avoid the time-consuming task of creating ‘diamond-mines’ filled with learning content, and instead focus more on the actual employee experience? How can we mitigate the more difficult aspects of the journey, so employees 'faint less, in the heat of the Sun'?

Well I think a very straightforward thing that line managers, and training departments, can do more of is to create spaces for reflection, and adult-like conversations where I imagine we might say to each other, something along the lines of: “Alright…let's both empty our pockets, and have a look at today's sand.”

Or as an L&D professionals we might use the concern-task-resource process (low-tech sand filterer) to uncover the concerns of employees and create resources that help them do their jobs better.

Whatever we do: No sand. No diamonds. We don't have to start with content, but we can start with concerns and experiences.