Part 3: How to ensure your programs produce lasting changes in leadership behavior and business impact

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“We have met they enemy and they are us”

- Walt Kelly, Pogo comic strip,? Earth Day, 1971

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Last week,? I argued that the key to ensuring your leadership programs garner the stakeholder support they deserve and improve organization performance is to design them to generate one thing: sticky and significant changes in leadership behavior?

I know this is a lot to ask of leadership programs.? And, I know from firsthand experience that the environments within which they are delivered play a big role. However—given how important good leadership is to the world AND that the billions of dollars spent globally every year on leadership programs are failing to produce the changes in behavior we need(1)—I think it’s time to expect more. Our programs and providers can and should have a greater impact.

This is why I’ve written this multiple-part series—to provide a possible path forward that can be leveraged by leadership training buyers and providers alike to improve the value their programs deliver.? I propose that my Real Work Process is one path. It’s an agnostic, transformative action learning methodology that can be leveraged to deliver lasting changes in almost any leadership behavior, and we’ve used it to develop tens of thousands of leaders globally for nearly three decades.

I’ll provide an overview of “Step 3: Facilitate Realization” in this article, but in case you didn’t read the previous two articles here’s a quick review of Steps 1 and 2!

• Step 1: Work on Real-World Problems. Instead of hoping your leaders apply what they learn at your programs to their problems, guarantee it by having them bring high-stakes problems that (a) they and their managers care about to your programs, (b) are just beyond the reach of their current leadership capabilities to solve, and (c) can only be solved by changing their behavior.??
• Step 2: Get & Give Your Leaders Access to How They Actually Behave in Real Life. To help leaders change their behavior, we need to access how they actually behave in real life. Personality assessments don’t do this, human blindspots render self-reporting highly unreliable, and direct observation of your leaders at work is usually impractical. We’ve offered our Personal Case Study tool, a behavioral research approach first developed by Harvard’s Chris Argyris in the 1970s because it provides a systematic, foolproof way to get access to how leaders really think and behave.

Okay, now let’s dive into step 3!

STEP 3: FACILITATE REALIZATION (aka “Self-Awareness”)

Leaders choose to change their behavior when they realize they behave (usually unintentionally!) in ways that are both ineffective and inconsistent with their own values and principles. Without the deep, internal commitment generated by such realizations, leaders will not take on the hard work of changing their own behavior.

As leadership development professionals, we need to create these realizations early in our programs because most leaders are insufficiently self-aware to benefit from being developed. In fact, research suggests that while 95% of leaders think they are self-aware, less than 15% actually are.(2)?

I suggest this is because the automatic nature of human behavior produces blind spots. As Brutus said to Cassius in Shakespeare’s Caesar, “The eye sees not itself.”? Or as American Southern folk wisdom reminds us, “You can’t see the label from inside the jar.”

This “Self-Awareness Gap” is one reasons most leadership programs fail. We jump too quickly to helping our leaders change before they’re aware of their gaps and have made the conscious choice to change.??

So how to help your leaders make free and informed choices about whether to change behavior? Here are some of the mechanisms we’ve used with tens of thousands of leaders (that we hope you can use too!):

1. Empowerment: Show your leaders how to use intuitive tools to analyze their own behavior (after you’ve helped them access their actual behavior during the Real Work Process Step 2). These analyses usually cause leaders to realize they behave in ways that are both ineffective and inconsistent with their own values. While helpful, such insights can be disturbing. This is why the next step is so important.
2. Compassion: Extensive research done by Harvard’s Chris Argryis and others demonstrates that a subconscious program exists in seemingly all human beings that leads us to over-pursue comfort and control—ways of behaving that are inconsistent with the courageous, collaborative leaders the world needs. It’s important to share this research with your leaders so they don’t blame themselves for their gaps. They’ve simply been run by sub-conscious forces of which they’ve been unaware…until now!?
3. Aspiration: Paint a crystal clear picture of what good leadership looks like in their unique context along with the personal and business benefits of behaving in these ways so that your leaders have something to shoot for and are excited to pursue it.

Once you’ve gotten your leaders to prioritize their development by having them bring to your programs high-stakes real-world problems that can only be solved by changing their behavior (step 1), gathered data on how they’re actually behave in real life (step 2), and helped them become self-aware of their behavior gaps and the consequences of those gaps (step 3), you’re finally ready to start helping your leaders master new leadership behaviors.? We’ll cover one proven way to do that in next week’s article.

(1) See: “Why Leadership Training Fails and What to Do About it,” Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2016 and “Where Companies Go Wrong with Learning and Development,” Harvard Business Review, Oct. 2019.

(2) “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It),” Harvard Business Review, January 2019.