Is traditional leadership development effective?

Well, that’s literally the billion-dollar question! Before I go down a path attempting to answer it, let’s put the question in context.

According to Training Industry, in 2019, the global L&D spend was approximately $370.3B. In the US alone, it was $169.4B. These numbers were the culmination of year-on-year spend increases since 2010. Based on an ATD 2012 estimation, Stanford business professor, Jeffrey Pfeffer, extrapolated year-on-year, approximately 20% of those expenditures were earmarked to leadership development.

As we have now been immersed in global catastrophes and unexpected shifts in how business is even conducted, survey after survey has indicated that HR, L&D professionals, and executives identify the need for effective leadership as an even greater requirement than ever. Three of my clients have literally committed over $250K to the leadership development of just 20 high-potentials.

I want to be clear, that organizations engage in leadership development with earnestness and positive intent. And I would also argue that most leadership development providers offer their services with equal verve and a strong belief in their overall positive impact. The problem is, a plethora of reviews by Pfeffer, Kellerman, Riggio, and others have laid out a very clear damnation of the leadership development industry as mostly failing to achieve what it espouses: making better leaders.

One general reason for this utter failure is that three questions all too often remain unanswered, causing most Talent Management teams to push programs that miss the boat.

What are we expecting these newly minted and taught leaders to be able to do differently because of the leadership program initiative?
How will we measure the programs’ efficacy-- both from a formative and a summative perspective?
And based on the answers to the previous two questions, what are we actually teaching in our programs?

Now getting more specific, as I see it, there are four inherent problems with traditional leadership development. Later, I will explore how we can indeed conduct effective leadership development using the research and evidence available to us.

Here are the four causes of leadership development problems:

A definition problem
Validity and reliability issues
Shifting contexts
Unclear, unstated, inconsistent, and misunderstood reasons, goals, objectives, and values for the LD initiative

Today’s topic: The Definition Problem

Is it management? Is it leadership? I have delved a bit into this topic in previous articles. In them, I have explored some of the inherent problems distinguishing between management and leadership behaviors and activities. The academic literature conflates the activities in their reviews and too often lumps management development and leadership initiatives into the same efficacy studies making it extremely difficult to determine what was what and what indeed had a positive impact. See Lacerenza and others (2017). In of itself, this isn’t a horrible problem if the outcomes are decent, and the stakeholders are happy with them. I further identified that over the past decades, many leadership gurus have defined management and leadership as pretty much the same thing. Leaders set direction. Managers plan. Leaders align people. Managers organize staff. The differences are minor or non-existent. And the list goes on and on. So, I ask again, what exactly are we teaching? Is it management with the label leadership?
The lack of distinction of concepts. All leaders should have integrity. Okay. I agree. But should all employees who are not leaders also have integrity? All leaders should inspire. Well sometimes, of course. But inspirational capabilities are useful in non-leadership settings, as well. Nowadays, I see folks argue that effective leaders are good storytellers. Or, if you are on LinkedIn, you may have noticed that every single post about leadership stipulates that empathy is an essential ability. The problem is that being empathic is not too shabby a characteristic for all people. In other words, we are left with quite a few abilities and characteristics defined as essential to leadership that are not distinct to leadership. More to the point, this conflation of what is essential to leadership undermines the ability to later measure what is effective and not. Why? Because maybe I am just an effective human, or an effective manager, or an effective team member. Once again, I am left with mushy, non-discreet attributes of leaders that make it difficult to determine exactly what we are teaching.
An overabundance of models and processes, and concepts. You also have an extraordinary amount of leadership models and processes one can adopt, whether it is Transformational Leadership, Servant Leadership, Situational Leadership, Trait-Based Leadership, Authentic Leadership, or Skill-Based Leadership. Peter Northouse, in his book, Leadership, Theory and Practice, has identified 15 models and approaches (as of his 9th edition) with some semblance of research credentials. Some of these models are literally at the extreme ends of the spectrum in terms of what they espouse and prescribe. And the research validating them is specious, at best. Being a servant leader might work today, but what about tomorrow? Being an inspirational leader might have worked yesterday, but today, we need to mobilize the masses quickly and don’t have time to inspire. So, what works in one situation won’t work in another.
Ignorance. We could ask key stakeholders what they want leaders to do within the organization and build a development program round that, as Pfeffer elegantly argues in his book, Leadership BS, what the hell do they know? In other words, we are asking stakeholders, experts, and those currently in the role to be able to explain exactly what they do, know how they do it, and indicate what should then be taught. As we know, however, SMEs are literally the worst group at being able to break down what they do and explain it. That would be acceptable if we designers could shadow them, interview them, and dissect their actions, intent, and mindset. Of course, leading is a very different animal than managing the security protocols of a nuclear power facility. So, getting experts in the execution of leadership to explain what they are doing is highly unreliable and difficult to achieve.
Denial. The other trick Pfeffer identifies is too often the traits and behaviors the stakeholders want are aspirational and not accurate reflections of what works well. The current leaders and stakeholders self-select what is effective leadership—choosing the overtly positive activities, traits, and behaviors and ignoring the negative ones. Pfeffer references Enron, and how their leadership and ethics programs highlighted integrity, honesty, and openness. Well, you know what happened there. Why did they highlight those values? Because, like us, they either aspirationally expected leaders to have them and live them, or they were told and internalized that effective leadership embodies those characteristics. But does it? History seems to indicate no. Enron executives famously led the way as we discovered in 2001. For example, few leaders would identify that effective leadership requires effective political machinations. Yet, it often does. Few, if any, programs ever teach leaders to be manipulative. Think, however, about Franklin Roosevelt, Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Steve Jobs. All were indeed manipulative. All were effective in their own rights.
Political Correctness. I firmly believe in the need for society to strive toward political correctness. And I strongly wear the badge, Woke on my sleeve (and hope I am as awake as I think I am). But that doesn’t exclude the fact that HR, L&D, and executives who read HBR, MIT SLOAN Management Review, Forbes, and other popular magazines blindly and obediently follow whichever fads gets promoted that month. Many have fully internalized pablum such as, “everyone is a leader,” or “everyone should lead,” or “we all can be leaders”. I get the idea is to make leadership a more inclusive function. But it is a function. In other words, maybe everyone can lead in different contexts. But within the realm of an organization, there are certain contexts where a few can lead not everyone else is capable to fulfill that role—or even wants it. These bumper sticker sayings undermine our ability to hone our vision for what we mean by leadership and how we can subsequently teach how to do it. It ignores the apocryphal Einstein quote that “things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.1” In other words, we oversimplify what a leader is, what a leader does, and therefore, what we teach in our LD programs.

Summary

To sum up so far, we are unclear about what we are talking about: leadership or management. Speaking of a lack of clarity, too many attributes assigned to the leadership are also attributes within other domains. There is no distinct variation. Is empathy truly essential to lead? Or just a requirement for being a good person?

We also have a ton of models and theories that wrap themselves in faux research and are inherently flawed because they are never effective in all cases. Those key stakeholders and current leaders are the ones we too often rely on to contextualize and define leadership in the organization. And they have no idea what they are talking about. We ignore the negative traits and skills that often round out leadership effectiveness. We self-select what to teach robbing our learners of the complete picture.
We focus on pablum and making everyone feel good about leading and leadership without going deeper and exploring what is under the hood.

The bottom line is the definition problem sets up a conundrum: deciding what we are designing, teaching, and evaluating. It is impossible to design effective learning if we are unclear of what works, what will work, and why it works. More importantly, it is impossible to design effective learning when the very concept we are trying to teach is nebulous and vague, ill-defined, and conflates with other concepts.

So, what is a poor, leadership development provider—asked to organize, develop, and deliver a leadership development program—to do? How does one choose what to design around? How does one decide what to teach?

Good questions. And we will get into that more deeply in future articles. But here are a few topics we will expound upon later:

Stop thinking of leadership as a title or a person. Think of it as a function. People lead when leadership is required. So, we teach people to recognize when the function of leadership is needed and apply it. What is “it?” I will apply the Zeigarnik Effect (if you don’t know the effect, the act of looking it up will make the joke funnier) and suggest you tune in to my future posts on what “it” is.
Focus on skills and functions. Since we already conflate management and leadership, consider the actual tasks and activities the learners do on their jobs today and will do tomorrow. Teach them how to enhance those. If you are teaching a CFO, we are pretty clear what CFOs do, so use that domain and the associated responsibilities as the context. That also means you cannot just teach leadership generically. As Paul Kirschner reminds me frequently, complex skills need to be taught within the specific context they will be used.
Apply Keith Grint’s approach to problems… we use leadership prescriptively when working through wicked problems. But we manage when engaging in tame problems. And we command when faced with an emergency. In other words, we always focus on the context.

Note:

1 Einstein never actually said this quote. But it is thought to be a derivative from a 1933 lecture he gave where he said, “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”

Bibliography

Grint, K. (2005). Problems, problems, problems: The social construction of ‘leadership.’ Human Relations. 58 (11), 1467-1494.

Kellerman, B. (2012). The end of leadership (1st ed.). New York: Harper Business, An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers.

Kellerman, B. (2015). Hard times: leadership in America. Stanford, California: Stanford Business Books, an imprint of Stanford University Press.

Lacerenza, C.N., Reyes, D.L., Marlowe, S.L., and Joseph, D.L. (2017). Leadership Training Design, Delivery, and Implementation: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 1686-1718.

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: theory and practice (Eighth Edition). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.

Pfeffer, J. (2015). Leadership BS: fixing workplaces and careers one truth at a time (First edition.). New York, NY: Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Riggio, R. E. (Ed.) (2018). What’s Wrong with Leadership? New York: Routledge.

Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M.. (1973) Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences. 4, pp. 155-169.