Why so many leadership programs fail. And five steps how to get it right.

You would think that the whole point of people going through leadership programmes is that at the end of it, they should be able to lead more effectively. But, by and large, Gina, it ain’t happening.

This was part of the provocative conversation I had last week with Todd Holzman. After a decades-long career which included teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and serving as the Head of Organisation Development at Honeywell, Todd is now founder and CEO of Holzman Leadership, which trains tens of thousands of global business leaders in what he calls his Real Work Process.

?“Worldwide the annual spend on corporate training programs is hundreds of billion dollars and a huge chunk of that is spent on building better leaders. Yet, there is very little evidence that that spend is actually doing that,” Todd told me.

?“We need to reimagine leadership development. It’s time to get real.”

?In fact, a seminal article from global management company, McKinsey, states US companies alone spend $14 billion a year on leadership development. But only seven percent of senior managers polled thought their companies developed their leaders effectively.

?“Then why do they still run these programs?” I wondered.

?“The reason,” Todd told me, “is it’s essentially a requirement. Development is a kind of currency.?There’s a lot of pressure. ‘Every company is doing it, so we better do it, too.’ And secondly, there are other benefits.?People feel appreciated. They feel invested in and they feel they’re getting something personal. There’s also a networking benefit.??Leaders like meeting other leaders and that creates more loyalty to an organisation. It helps instill culture and values. So, there is some positive value coming out of it.

?“The fundamental problem with leadership programmes is people are not making the distinction between informational learning and transformational learning,” Todd said. “Informational learning is pouring knowledge into people’s heads like tips and techniques you can count on people to be able to act according to that knowledge under real life pressure.

?“But if it’s a transformational learning challenge, that for them to produce those new-found practices they watched or read about under real life pressure, then you have to bring about some fundamental changes in how people think and act. That’s transformational.”

?Todd shared his transformational Real Work Process with me, and now, dear readers, I’m delighted to share it here with you.

?HOW TO DEVELOP LEADERS MORE EFFECTIVELY

?1.?????REAL WORLD PROBLEMS

“What we shouldn’t do is hope they will apply what they learn in our programmes to their problems. Hope is nice, but it is not a strategy,” Todd said.?“What we should do instead is tell leaders to bring their real-world problems to the programme.?Nothing motivates a leader to learn, grow and change like a real problem they have.”

?2.????INDIVIDUAL DATA

Working on real world problems that your participants really care about is a big shift in the field according to Todd.

“To become transformational, we have to know how they would actually behave in that situation. Not how they say they would behave. We’re all just human beings and we all have our blind spots.?It’s hard to see the label from inside the jar.”

So, Todd encourages his clients to write down to the best of their memory what they and the other people actually said in the situation they are struggling with like a script in a play.?

?“When you say, ‘Say what you would say’, you’re getting their true behaviour. Don’t ask, ‘How did you behave?’ ?This question accesses the part of our brain where our theories about how we should behave are stored, but it does not access the part of our brain where the programmes that design our behaviour are stored.?This tool is the way to get real easy access to a person’s data. In qualitative research circles it is lauded for its reliability and validity.”

?3.????REALISATION

Todd explained that the scripting tool activates a realisation moment. “We are able to, with them, analyse what is working or missing from their leadership approach.?They have a light-bulb moment that is a huge self-awareness moment which allows them to take responsibility.”

?4.????RE-PROGRAMMING

Yet even the most powerful self-awareness is not enough to generate significant and sustainable change in leadership behavior.?Understanding that, Todd takes his clients through a process of reprogramming. Rather than role-plays, he stresses the importance of applying “real-plays” which aim to more fully recreate the situation clients are struggling with.?Trainers don’t let the client simulate their conversation all the way to the finish line before interrupting. They will interfere in real-time to help catch client errors and disrupt old neural pathways to etch a new, more helpful approach.?They repeat this over and over again so a client has muscle-memoried a clearer way forward.

?5.????REAL WORLD RESULTS

Because the trainers have worked at a deeper behavioural level, the new behaviours are more broadly applicable for clients according to Todd.

?“The next phase is they have to go out and do it again.?They write three to five additional leadership challenges they’ll take on, because now with the new confidence and abilities, they can take on more. We’ll hear within the next thirty days, amazing success stories. We interview the leaders and share the stories all across the business because they are a source of inspiration.

?“That’s how we’re going to build better leaders,” said Todd. And that, dear readers, is how you can too.

?Fortune 500 executive coach, trainer and speaker, write to Gina in care of [email protected] or right here on Linked In!!

@TheGinaLondon