How to design and deliver for impact
As companies see the difference that leadership can make for the value of a business, no business can afford to rely on ‘leadership to show up when and how it is needed, just like that’. Leadership development is an essential part of any business performing, growing and/or transforming. Yet, data suggest that the investment in leadership development is rarely generating the expected results.
How to overcome this paradox? How to leverage your efforts and create impact? This is where the overall design of and approach to your leadership development interventions makes a difference. It is key to:
- Create alignment in the senior leadership on the two or three critical capabilities/changes in behaviour that will make the difference in accelerating the business growth, and how these are supposed to be displayed in the business.
- Without alignment on this aspired impact, it is unlikely for the top team to exemplify the will and resilience to living and growing the critical leadership behaviours themselves, needed to make it stick.
- The ‘alternative’ – we have planned & budgeted for it - to stuff a leadership programme with lots of useful topics and sessions and expect the right thing to come out, is not the answer. Better keep the money in your pocket.
- Bring the leadership development efforts ‘just-in-time’: the hunger to learn and develop should not only come from the kind offer of HR, but from the need felt in the business and the explicit wish to do things in a better, different and more consistent way.
- Design the programme to be part of the job, not coming ‘on top’ of the job: it is part of the job, it helps to do their job, better. It exemplifies the new ways of working and new behaviours, by guiding leaders from knowing why and what, to knowing how and doing it naturally .
- It is going beyond ‘bringing reality into the learning context’ (which the typical ‘action learning’ approaches claim to do): it takes the (aspired) reality as the foundation to drive growth and learning, ‘learning in action’.
- This not only refers to the topics and subjects, but also to the timing, to the space and to the place (a conference hotel, or separate meeting on top of already full agendas with ample existing meetings), and to the format. Learning can be integrated in ‘normal business rhythm’, as part of the business, not separate from it.
- Go beyond theory/concepts, skills and/or tips, templates and tricks. This is because a great deal of growth, is blocked or fuelled by the mindset, beliefs and drive of the people involved. No change without personal engagement, beyond cognitive exposure. Never, ever, underestimate the mindset; but also: realise that we act ourselves into a new way of thinking, rather than the other way around.
- Incorporate dialogue with and learning from peers, people who have lived through the ups and down of doing this, peers who suffer the similar issues and pain. Not to copy what others have done, but to help shifting the way we look, and discovering how we can go about it and make it happen, for us.
- Make it fun, even if and especially about the most serious subjects. Let it be a unique experience, even if not all aspects feels easy or even comfortable. Fun is about the thrill, the acceptance and experience of discovery; not the amount of laughter or on the contrary, tears that the average participant produces.
Cause while we all consider our organisation and people to be special and unique, we can not expect the outcomes of a rather generic approach to bring the unique impact your unique organisation expects to see. Make it your space, to grow; to make you grow; to make you grow yourself.