Are you taking the Empty or Full Vessel approach to development?

Ping. Ping. Ping. I was both excited and annoyed. Our new MS Teams integration was working so beautifully that the notifications were distracting!

Flow broken, I tapped to check out what they contained. Wow! 23 new insights shared in the last 90 mins. These rich insights came from senior leaders going through an extensive development experience with Adeption and, excuse the geek in me, were the stuff of dreams for a leadership development professional.?

These senior leaders weren’t just showing up and doing the minimum; they were engaging, taking action on the job, reflect on those actions and choosing to write, share and comment on each other's reflections.

This is in stark contrast to one of the biggest challenges we hear from organizations: How do you get busy leaders to meaningfully engage in development programs?

This seems like a tough challenge to solve. Most leaders are overwhelmed with information, priorities, and complexity. With so much to deal with already, development programs can feel like adding another thing to the pile.

So why were these leaders so different??

I think it comes down to some assumptions about learning and development that, if we’re honest, are hard to admit.?

The normal approach

Think about the usual approach to learning and development. An expert — the facilitator — stands in front of the group and facilitates in order to teach a set of best-practices or ‘content’, while participants nod, take notes and discuss how to apply the concepts at work.?

If done well, everyone is happy, boxes are ticked.

However, the moment the ‘event’ is over most of what is covered is forgotten and not applied. There are certainly no distracting reflections coming through from leaders about the actions they’ve taken —months after the last workshop! Long term engagement is low and so is, ‘actual’, development.

One view - the empty vessel

Reflecting on this approach and the contrasting example I shared above, it helps to borrow inspiration from the idea that we often see different parts of the same problem, and incorrectly see them as different things. You know, I see a trunk and you see a tail, but we are both looking at an elephant, just from different perspectives.

I believe the perspective driving a common approach to development is that we in L&D see people as ‘empty vessels’ that need to be filled with content and told what to do, or ‘helped’. It’s very forgivable, as in our line of work we have access to powerful tools and frameworks that can be game-changing. I’m often told (and experience) comments from L&D professionals like, “leaders so desperately need what we can give them if only I can engage them to see it!”.

It looks like this:

Another view - the ‘full vessel’?

Alternatively we can ‘see’ leaders differently. We can notice that leaders already have plenty of experience and wisdom to draw on, as well as self-awareness of their current gaps. They are also intently focused on the challenges and priorities they have.

With this view, it’s clear leaders don’t need more content and things to do added to them. Like pouring more into a full vessel, this simply leads to overflow (and overwhelm). Instead, we see that what leaders are often lacking is the time and space to connect to their own wisdom and to deeply reflect on the challenges and opportunities they’re facing.?

An integrated picture - time and space

Like often, I suspect the best approach is probably a bit of both.?

This is how we design our experiences. Rather than have the focus of teaching best-practices, our goal is to create the space and structure for people to step back, reflect, tap into and share their existing wisdom, and recognize their own strengths and development needs.?

We then connect them with a range of relevant leadership models, tools, and peer-generated insights that they can pull from to take inspiration from, experiment with, close gaps and share with others.?

This integrated view is critical to the success of the program I mentioned earlier, and is at the heart of our signature Be Conscious, Be Curious, Be Better (B3) methodology. There are other approaches that do similar things, just not nearly enough or at the scale required in my experience.

With this approach, the big challenges with learning and development in workplaces — engagement, commitment, and long term impact — disappear.?

The reality is most people find their work important and when you link development to that work — hey presto, they engage. That’s what our B3 method enables: development in service to and in the flow of work.?

I’d love to hear your take on this. How does this empty/full vessel analogy resonate with you? And what are you curious to learn more about or see research on?