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Most successful leaders are those who have taken on tough challenges that shaped their identities and abilities, rather than attending some executive development programme.

Ganesh Chella

This is the time of the year when most organisations complete their annual appraisals and start planning their developmental initiatives.

Always high on priority is the need to develop leaders across levels. While some reach out to premier management schools in India and abroad, others design in-house programmes to meet the need.

By the end of the year, a lot of time and money would have been invested and Human Resource heads would be expected to justify the returns on the investments made. While some would have a good story to tell, most would conclude that the programme was good but the effects back home were far from satisfactory.

So, what does it take to make the leadership development investments work for you? What does it take to ensure that your leaders demonstrate some lasting change?

The subject of developing leaders has held the fascination of management thinkers, behavioural scientists, educators and business leaders for ages. Serious theories and models, on the one side, and biographical accounts of successful leaders, on the other, abound.

Yet, the gap between all these great theories and the actual leadership development process is quite frustrating.

The first step for any organisation in bridging this gap is the effective identification and articulation of key leadership behaviours, appropriate and relevant to its own context in the form of a leadership competency framework.

The other critical element in bridging the execution gap is the presence of a well thought through development process that straddles all levels and is not restricted to the top.

There is a commonly held belief that leadership development is about running a well-structured high-profile learning event.

In fact, much time, effort and money is spent on designing these learning events with the hope that it will help develop leaders.

Quite often these efforts yield disappointing results, not because the learning event was ill-designed, but because there was lack of emphasis placed on what will happen before and after the learning event.

The learning event can at best build perspectives, provide insights and build awareness and impart skills. A lot more needs to happen around this.

While describing the limits of traditional executive education teaching in the just released book Coach and Couch, Martine Van Den Poel who was Director of INSEAD’s customised programmes, says that while participants rated the ir programmes excellent, they also made such comments as, “I wish to understand myself better both as a person and as a manager,” or “I want to improve my impact as a manager”, “How am I perceived as a manager”.

Similarly, one of my clients conducted a very high profile leadership development programme with the help of faculty drawn from across the globe. Interestingly, however, among all the elements of the programme, what participants liked most was the self-awareness they gained through a tool that was administered to them!

Clearly, unless participants and leaders gain a heightened level of self awareness about their current style of leadership and the perceived effectiveness of their style, they will not be in a position to make changes or adapt to their team members’ expectations. It is for this reason that more and more organisations are using 360 degree feedback as the central mechanism and basis for development.

This of course means that participants need to understand the criticality of feedback as a means of leadership development and learn to welcome it and leverage it for their benefit.

History is replete with examples of great leaders who achieved their greatness when they had the opportunity to face tough workplace challenges and could apply their abilities to deal with such challenges.

Organisations that have a proven track record of developing leaders do this by ensuing that their best talent gets assigned to handle a wide range of challenging assignments in a planned manner. Similarly, individuals who readily welcome the opportunity to move, relocate and take up anything that they are assigned to end up developing critical leadership abilities.

Most successful leaders talk about the tough challenges that shaped their identities and abilities. Few talk about having attended some great programmes.

In fact, participants in leadership programmes feel de-motivated when they learn great skills, but are unable to find appropriate workplace challenges to apply them or when their managers do not direct them towards such challenges.

This explains why employees sponsored to executive education programmes as a part of a retention plan actually end up leaving!

Most leadership development programmes fail because the supervising manager does not engage in a developmental relationship during and after the programme. In fact, the supervising manager is quite often far removed from or not included in the entire developmental effort.

On the other hand, when the supervising manager is included in the process or he chooses to engage in a developmental relationship, leadership development becomes extremely effective.

The supervising manager is not the only developmental relationship that is leveraged for leadership development. It has become extremely common for leaders to be offered the benefit of executive coaches to address specific aspects of leadership style and personal change. These leaders are seeing the benefit of partnering with someone who can help them navigate through these challenges of development and realise their full potential.

Beyond all these well planned efforts there is of course one big determinant — the person himself. Organisations cannot assume leadership development to be a mechanistic process where what goes in comes out.

In leadership development, a lot can go in and nothing can come out because the individuals may not have given themselves the permission for development and change!

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