What’s missing in leadership development?
Only a
few actions matter, and they require the CEO’s attention.
Organizations have
always needed leaders
who are good at recognizing emerging challenges and inspiring organizational responses.
That need is intensifying today as leaders confront, among other things,
digitization, the surging power of data as a competitive weapon, and the
ability of artificial intelligence to automate the workplace and enhance
business performance. These technology-driven shifts create an imperative for
most organizations to change, which in turn demands more and better leaders up
and down the line.
Unfortunately, there is
overwhelming evidence that the plethora of services, books, articles, seminars,
conferences, and TED-like talks purporting to have the answers—a global
industry estimated to be worth more than $50 billion—are delivering disappointing
results. According to a recent Fortune survey, only 7 percent
of CEOs believe their companies are building effective global leaders, and just
10 percent said that their leadership-development initiatives have a clear
business impact. Our latest research has a similar message: only 11 percent of
more than 500 executives we polled around the globe strongly agreed with the
statement that their leadership-development interventions achieve and sustain
the desired results.
In our survey, we asked
executives to tell us about the circumstances in which their
leadership-development programs were effective and when they were not. We found
that much needs to happen for leadership development to work at scale, and
there is no “silver bullet” that will singlehandedly make the difference
between success and failure .
That said,
statistically speaking, four sets of interventions appear to matter most:
contextualizing the program based on the organization’s position and strategy,
ensuring sufficient reach across the organization, designing the program for
the transfer of learning, and using system reinforcement to lock in change.
This is the first time we have amassed systematic data on the interventions
that seem to drive effective leadership-development programs. Interestingly,
the priorities identified by our research are to a large extent mirror images
of the most common mistakes that businesses
make when trying to improve the capabilities of their managers. Collectively,
they also help emphasize the central role of technology today in necessitating
and enabling strong leadership development.
Focus on the shifts that matter
In our survey,
executives told us that their organizations often fail to translate their
company’s strategy into a leadership model specific to their needs (whether it
is, say, to support a turnaround, a program of acquisitions, or a period of
organic growth). Conversely, organizations with successful
leadership-development programs were eight times more likely than those with
unsuccessful ones to have focused on leadership behavior that executives
believed were critical drivers of business performance.
The implications are
clear for organizations seeking to master today’s environment of accelerating
disruption: leadership-development efforts must be animated by those new
strategic imperatives, translating them into growth priorities for individual
managers, with empathy for the degree of change required. An important piece of
the puzzle is enhancing the ability of leaders to adapt to different situations
and adjust their behavior (something that requires a high degree of
self-awareness and a learning mind-set). Leaders with these attributes are four
times more prepared to lead amidst change.
Make it an organizational journey, not cohort specific
Ensuring sufficient
reach across the organization has always been important to the success of
leadership-development efforts. Organizations with successful programs were six
to seven times more likely than their less successful peers to pursue
interventions covering the whole organization, and to design programs in the
context of a broader leadership-development strategy. The same went for
companies whose leadership strategy and model reached all levels of the
organization.
Achieving sufficient
reach amidst today’s rapid change is challenging: most leadership-development
programs are typically of short duration (a few weeks to several months),
sporadic, and piecemeal—making it difficult for the program to keep up with
changes in the organization’s priorities, much less develop a critical mass of
leaders ready to pursue them.
Fortunately, technology
isn’t just stimulating the need for change; it’s also enabling faster, more flexible, large-scale learning on digital platforms that can
host tailored leadership development, prompt leaders to work on specific kinds
of behavior, and create supportive communities of practice, among other
possibilities.
Design for the transfer of learning
Technology can also
help companies break out of the “teacher and classroom” (facilitator and
workshop) model that so many still rely on, maximizing the value and
organizational impact of what is taught and learned. Fast-paced digital
learning is easier to embed in the day-to-day work flows of managers. Every
successful leader tells stories of how he or she developed leadership
capabilities by dealing with a real problem in a specific context, and our
survey provides supporting evidence for these anecdotes: companies with
successful leadership-development programs were four to five times more likely
to require participants to apply their learnings in new settings over an
extended period and to practice them in their job.
This is just one of
several modern adult-learning principles grounded in neuroscience that
companies can employ to speed the behavior and mind-set shifts leaders need to
thrive in today’s fast-changing environment. Others include learning through a
positive frame (successful leadership developers were around three times more
likely to allow participants to build on a strength rather than correcting a
development area), and providing coaching that encourages introspection and
self-discovery (which also was three times more prevalent among successful
leadership developers).
Embedding change
Leadership-development
efforts have always foundered when participants learn new things, but then
return to a rigid organization that disregards their efforts for change or even
actively works against them. Given the pace of change today, adapting systems,
processes, and culture that can support change-enabling leadership development
is critically important. Technology can support organizational interventions
that accelerate the process. For example, blogs, video messages, and
social-media platforms help leaders engage with many more
people as they seek to foster understanding, create conviction, and act as role
models for the desired leadership behavior and competencies.
Also critical are
formal mechanisms (such as the performance-management system, the talent-review
system, and shifts in organizational structure) for reinforcing the required
changes in competencies.2In our latest research,
we found that successful leadership-development programs were roughly five to
six times more likely to involve senior leaders acting as project sponsors,
mentors, and coaches and to encompass adaptations to HR systems aimed at
reinforcing the new leadership model. Data-enabled talent-management
systems—popularized by Google and often referred to as people analytics—can
increase the number of people meaningfully evaluated against new competencies
and boost the precision of that evaluation.
Most CEOs have gotten
religion about the impact of accelerating disruption and the need to adapt in
response. Time and again, though, we see those same CEOs forgetting about the
need to translate strategy into specific organizational capabilities, paying
lip service to their talent ambitions, and delegating responsibility to the
head of learning with a flourish of fine words, only for that individual to
complain later about lack of support from above. To be fair, CEOs are pulled in
many directions, and they note that leadership development often doesn’t make
an impact on performance in the short run.
At the same time, we
see many heads of learning confronting CEOs with a set of complex interwoven
interventions, not always focusing on what matters most.
But as the pace of
change for strategies and business models increases, so does the cost of
lagging leadership development. If CEOs and their top teams are serious about
long-term performance, they need to commit themselves to the success of corporate
leadership-development efforts now. Chief human-resource officers and heads of
learning need to simplify their programs, focusing on what really matters.
By Claudio Feser, Nicolai Nielsen, and
Michael Rennie
McKinsey
Quarterly August 2017
http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/leadership/whats-missing-in-leadership-development?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1708&hlkid=e28d139ea15544f48f1a5a32ba216e98&hctky=1627601&hdpid=62f9ee5f-8755-4e06-b2df-c0ca842f0c9f
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