Seriously… Don’t bother. I am not saying LEADERSHIP is a waste of time. I am saying the development, or more specifically, the way we currently train leaders is a waste of time and money if you draw a tight circle around the return (results) on the investment.

If you prefer to avoid my rant and simply get something practical, skip to the end of this post. I list seven questions you should answer in the affirmative before doing any leadership team development. 

Otherwise, commence rant…

The past decade has been a struggle for me. I have failed to create an overwhelmingly “plug-and-play” leadership guide for all humanity to change the trajectory of campus performance.

I have developed fancy models, checklists, bold statements, processes, principles, fortune cookie sayings, and so much more over the last ten years. 

But, no… I have not created anything I believe has helped executive teams (and their teams) put more points on the board. Much of what I have taught and coached has helped deepen the Lead Measures and the reliability of Systems to put more points on the board, but my focus of this post is on leadership. 

I have taken the position that leadership is skill-based. You either have it or you don’t. If a campus leader applies a set of skills competently and consistently, they will effectively evolve into a leader worth following. 

I also hold the position that leadership is contextual. In other words, successfully navigating situations makes the leader (more confident and competent). However, please note that none of these sticks-in-the-sand have produced better leaders.

The problem is that if I want to teach people to be better leaders as a consultant, coach, and trainer, I must teach it as a linear truth with little tolerance for variation. This would be taught as a best practice or a standard, right?

But, alas, I don’t think leadership is teachable as a best practice or a standard. Leaders are born and then made by circumstances, struggles, pain, and setbacks, seasoned with a healthy dose of mentoring via genuine relationships along the way. 

Oh, and the successful ones must tip their hat to a boatload of luck (GRACE) if they are honest.

In other words, my programs don't yield what they are hyped-up to deliver — Leaders. 

Honestly, I observe my colleagues doing similar work yielding no better results. 

Leadership is kind of a skill, but mostly an art form developed over a lifetime of modeling, trial, and error, reflection, and adaptation.

As the boss, you define leadership. Your choice - the good kind or the wrong kind. Over time, this becomes your leadership culture. If you define leadership as a set of behaviors, you then teach your people the importance of those behaviors. However, just because you define leadership as a set of behaviors does not mean that applying those behaviors yields LEADERSHIP. 

You also must define leadership outcomes to follow those behaviors, and you must see that those behaviors yield those outcomes all the time to claim that they reliably give you LEADERSHIP.

According to Google, there are thousands and thousands of hits for the word leadership. I am pretty sure, without analyzing them all that there is no common application of the word, which leaves us with the problem identified above… How do you define LEADERSHIP in a helpful way to teach it uniformly and scale it consistently? 

It has been argued that many focused hours of practice can help develop one into an expert. 

This argument is missing one of the critical components of the original research. (In fact, in his book, Outliers, often overlooked when people reference it, Malcolm Gladwell says the same thing.) That talent must also be present, and the talented person must have a support system in place to allow them to develop their innate talent (and skill) while they practice. 

Innate talent is essential. When I teach leadership skills, it either sticks or does not stick based on the talent the leader already has. Working to apply leadership skills on a doofus will still be inadequate leadership no matter how extensive the practice, development, or weighty the experience. 

You can lead wherever you are is a paradigm held across most campuses across the country. This ideal is honorable, and I believe that all people have the ability to influence across their spheres of influence. The question is, with what potency (results-based impact)?

Campuses across the country spend millions of dollars in conferences, seminars, team trainings, and the like, to raise up leaders, but rarely, if at all, do any of these systems run a return on the investment on these interventions. 

“Working to apply leadership skills on a doofus will still be inadequate leadership no matter how extensive the practice, development, or weighty the experience.”

Or, if one breaks down the skills into a set of skills or best practices, rarely do they align to a universal set of skills needed to get the work done to the next level. Rather, leadership has become just another word for launching initiatives, project management, and supervision of your division of employees. 

From what I have studied, the great leaders of history (Lincoln, Alexander, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, et al.) never were (fill in the blank) award winners. They didn’t have certificates of completion nailed to their office walls indicating they were “in sessions” to become better leaders. 

And, if we did an analysis of all the countless participants in your system who enrolled in training programs or leadership development initiatives, how many of them have become great as a direct result of those initiatives? For those who did, would they have achieved their success regardless of the training? In many ways, I would argue a big Fat YES. 

Is this a valid argument? 

Great leaders historically did not advance their influence and impact using the methods incorporated in the training and development industry space (which is quite lucrative). With the advent of social marketing tactics, we are being bombarded by consultants and trainers who utterly believe their training methods produce GREAT LEADERS. 

Prove it. 

Show the return, and I will eat my left sock and come to work as your senior director of sales. 

Leadership is an ability, that requires a set of circumstances, that requires luck, and that requires followers who are inspired. Analyses of historical leadership have never produced the same set of criteria between leaders. In other words, no two leaders are the same. Great books providing comparative analyses of leaders are found in plenty and rarely profess similar conclusions. 

So, it is with conceit that we believe leadership is universally teachable via a shiny product or program that can be boiled down to a simple set of standards or best practices. It is even with greater hubris that we think the same leadership ability is within all of us. In my work, I encounter loads and loads of leaders (in title) who are not LEADING (results). 

Just sayin.’

Here’s my challenge to you. The next time you are fixin’ to bring in someone to do leadership development, ask yourself the following questions. They are in no particular order.

1. Why? What are you hoping leadership development will do for you? Really answer this question as explicitly and specifically as possible. The more specific you can be, the more likely you will identify the true training opportunity or the true organization development problem that needs solving. 
   
   
2. Is there something, or a situation in the organization that requires transformation? In other words, is there an opportunity to totally reinvent your success system?
   
   
3. Do you want your people to actually lead? According to James MacGregor Burns, leadership is defined as mobilizing a group of people from point A to point B. Is there a vivid Point B to move people toward?
   
   
4. Do your people have the innate talent to become leaders? Do they have good character, chemistry, competence, and credibility? Do they have hunger, humility, and smarts?
   
   
5. Does the organizational structure and culture allow your people to lead? Is the structure set up to allow leaders at lower levels in the organization to actually lead? If not, why bother? 
   
   
6. Should you be developing all, or a few of them who (in turn) will lead the rest? 
   
   
7. Do you have a framework for quality leadership? What common tools, language, and methodologies can be used to multiply these ideals across your system?

My guess is that most of the questions above may be answered with hope and a shoulder shrug. 

Good News!

The development that followed my encounter with Maria had all 5s in the following categories:

1. The development experience treated leaders as engaged learners. 
   1, 2, 3, 4, 5
   
   
2. The topic focus was deep enough to provide tools to immediately impact our practice. 
   1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
   
   
3. Follow-up support and discussion questions were made available to reinforce the learning.
   1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
   
   
4. The development session allowed team time to focus the learning on a team challenge with opportunities to coach each other to problem solve.
   1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
   
   
5. The development session provided measures of team accountability by asking how previous session tools had been applied in common practice.
   1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
   
   
6. The development session was geared to equip our team with the tools, language, and methodology to advance our performance objectives as results.
   1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Wrap Up

Yes, many leaders may want to fist-bump Maria because they have experienced a myriad of wasted time, resources, and productivity due to poor executive PD. The good news is that there are many great examples out there where Executive Team Coaching moved campus leaders to become system influencers who raised the standard of organizational culture, organizational clarity, and overall performance improvement. 

Let’s turn those instances (from best practice to Better Practice) into the new status quo.

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