Enabling leadership

I tend to receive a lot of enquiries for leadership courses. With so many popular ‘packages’ available on the market I can understand how organizations assume that a standalone programme is what they need.

However, recent research has concluded that individual initiatives like these are the least sustainable in terms of performance improvement. There seems to me to be little point in investing time, energy and money into packaged programmes (however good their content) unless, in parallel, there are organizational interventions which ensure that the outcomes of such programmes can be implemented in an appropriate context.

What do I mean by this?

Let me give you an example. A major financial services organization spent a king’s ransom on leadership development courses for all its managers – cascading the courses down the levels from senior to first-line managers. The content was of a high-quality and participants were motivated to attend by the promise that these development initiatives would pave the way for organizational transformation.

When delegates returned to their jobs after each programme they were enthused to take action in their individual teams.

What major improvements were achieved? Very few.

Political in-fighting continued. Head Office functions continued to work in non-cooperative silos. Bureaucracy did not disappear. HR processes remained as cumbersome as ever.

Why?

The programme focused on managers as individuals, talking about their behaviour and personal working styles as the keys to change. What it ignored is: the organizational systems needed to change in order to support those individuals. The infrastructure was disregarded as a possible cause to performance problems. The organization had too many layers and business functions were not aligned correctly to collaborate with each other. Managers were not being held accountable. Roles, authority levels and role relationships were often ill-defined. There were no accurate methods for identifying how well the managers’ capabilities matched the requirements of their roles (indeed, a large number of them were in the wrong role for their level of capability).

But it is easy and tempting to take the short cut when you are in trouble. Organizational interventions do take time and require huge commitment to sustain them. Training programmes are therefore still seen as a quick and relatively cheap route to performance improvements. Not enough, I think, is done in terms of measuring their long-term impact.

Managers, I think, can only perform when the organizational context enables them. It’s hard to fight a system – indeed, why should you be expected to do so? I know of many people who invested huge amounts of time and emotional energy to improve their part of the organization only to be driven back by systems which disenfranchised them.
What have been your experiences?