Debunking leadership development myths in favour of impact

Find ways to help leaders learn about leading while delivering strategy, in real time. Don’t learn about leading in an abstract, detached way and hope some of the ideas will get applied in real life. Hope isn’t a strategy; it’s a myth to imagine that the theories and models that fill most of the business school programmes are ever going to make an impact.

Focus on the skills that enable people to work with one another, even when they don’t agree. To solve complex adaptive problems, we need to call upon a diverse set of perspectives and experiences. This is why we can’t rely on the myth of the hero leader any longer, even though we are fearful. Acting collectively requires cooperation and collaboration which means power needs to move within the organisation. You need to know when to follow another’s lead.

When too much power is in too few hands and can’t move, the system becomes stuck and risks feeling coercive. The dialogic skills we need like the capacity to truly listen with the willingness to change are hard to develop, especially if you’re convinced, you’re right.

Make relationships the focus on the interventions, not individuals. Leadership happens in the messy place between people. It is a relational act. A social process. Being good at it is not the same as being the smartest person in the room, that’s the next myth. Good leadership means being good at relating to people. This means making them feel safe, seen, heard, appreciated, valued and cared about. We have built an entire leadership development industry where the focus is on the individual. What if we focused instead on teams, or groups who had collective responsibility for an outcome?

Help leaders reinvent themselves. We have inherited a tradition where the person selected to lead a team is often the one who is best at the work of the team. This tradition suggests leaders need the ability to have the best “technical” solution, but this too is a myth! When you’re a leader, you realise that if you keep on doing what got you that role in the first place, you’re doing the wrong work.

You learn to stop being the best technical problem solver and instead take on different roles, especially with more senior colleagues who don’t need an instructor but a coach. Personal reinvention can be challenging, especially if it touches on your personal sense of identity.

Build strong partnerships across the whole organisation so that developing leaders is less a specialist ivory tower and more a strategy implementation mechanism. Historically we’ve measured leadership development solutions using what’s called level one evaluation. This is immediate satisfaction data, but it easily becomes a measure of entertainment value. Unfortunately, if I liked the jokes I was told and the eggs I got for breakfast, it won’t make me a better leader.

Our final myth is magic doesn’t happen in the room! If we move our attention to the increased impact leaders add after the development process, and the value of getting a strategy implemented, we have a chance to track real return on investment. But be prepared for this to be difficult. One of the challenges we have encountered is that leaders themselves find the process demanding; “why should I be doing this, isn’t it someone else’s role” they ask? And that’s the point, that’s exactly why strategy is hard to implement, because it falls between the cracks that are inevitable in a complex organisation.

Like in my AI example, I could say that operationalising the use of AI is in IT’s hands and the impact of AI on leadership is too big for me to get my arms round but then the challenges will remain. I need to lean in, listen, collaborate and create the conditions where we can come together to lead our way through these difficulties.