Part 2: How to Ensure Your Programs Deliver Lasting Changes in Leadership Behavior

Several weeks ago, I argued that complaints about time on leadership programs are often not complaints about time at all.? They are often complaints about value. Leadership program participants, their managers, and “the business” don’t feel the programs are creating enough value to justify the time invested in them.? And they wouldn’t be wrong because…

Studies show that most leadership programs are ineffective:

• 75% of 1,500 managers surveyed from across 50 organizations were dissatisfied with their company’s Learning & Development (L&D) function
• 70% of employees report they haven’t mastered the skills needed for their jobs
• Only 12% of employees apply new skills learned in programs to their jobs
• Only 25% of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey believe that training measurably improved performance

The Solution

Design programs to produce sticky changes in leadership behavior.?

The key to changing all of this is to ensure your leadership programs produce lasting changes in leadership behavior AND that this new behavior is used by your leaders to solve real-world problems. As renowned Harvard Professor and organization behavior thought leader, Michael Beer put it: “For the most part, the learning doesn’t lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things.”

A Proven, Widely-Applicable Methodology

This is where I believe a development methodology I’ve been advancing for nearly three decades can help. I call it the Real-Work Process, and my hope is that it will be used by training buyers and providers alike to improve the value their programs create for the leaders who go through them, and the people and organizations they in turn affect.?

Review of Step 1?

Stop hoping leaders apply what they learn at your programs to their problems. Have them work on their real-world problems during your programs to ensure application. Last week, I described the first step of the process, “Real-World Problem Selection.” ? This is where leaders select high-stakes real-world problems (RWPs) to tackle during your programs. But while selecting RWPs that they, their managers, and the business care about is a great start, it isn’t enough.??

To kick start changes in leadership behavior, your leaders must also select RWPs that are just beyond the reach of their current leadership capabilities, ones that can only be solved by changing their behavior. This is more than Action Learning—it’s Transformative Action Learning.

Overview of Step 2

Get “real-world data” on how your leaders actually behave.?

Real-world data is directly observable data on how your leaders actually behave, NOT how they say they behave. It matters because if we’re going to help leaders change their behavior, we need to give them access to how they actually behave in real life. Simple in theory, but not in practice…

Personality assessments (while useful) don’t reveal actual behavior.

Static personality assessments (e.g., Hogan, Insights) might reveal what motivates your leaders, but they won’t tell you anything about how leaders actually behave in dynamic, real-life situations.?

Why not get it from the horse’s mouth?

You also can’t just ask leaders how they behave because such questions only access the part of the brain that stores their espoused theories, i.e., how they think they should behave. But such questions don’t access the part of the brain that stores their theories-in-use, i.e., how they actually behave. ?It’s no wonder the research demonstrates that self-reporting is highly unreliable!

Direct observation of leaders behaving would be great, but…

Your company probably won’t let you to mic up your leaders or follow them around with a video camera. (“Hey would you mind if I filmed this really awkward conversation with your team?”) And since you can’t suddenly become a fly on the wall—which by the way wouldn’t be all that helpful because flies don't have ears and die after 2 days—what to do?

The Personal Case Study Approach

We’ve converted a behavioral research tool first developed by Harvard’s Chris Argyris in the 1970s into a proprietary developmental tool for leaders that we call a Personal Case Study.? Recognized in qualitative research circles for both its validity and reliability, the tool provides a systematic, foolproof way to get access to how leaders really think and behave that only takes them 30-45 minutes to complete.?

If you’re interested in learning more about the tool, someone from my team would be more than happy to demo it for you.? Just let us know via this link .

I hope you found this valuable, and I’ll be back with Step 3 next week!?

1. “Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning and Development,” Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2019.
2. “Why Leadership Training Fails and What to Do About it,” Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2016.
3. Harvard’s Chris Agryris coined the distinction between espoused theories and theories-in-use in the 1970s.