Developing Leaders

Why Traditional Leadership Training Misses the Mark

Mary Hladio

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781292017891, 9781683502258
• eBook ISBN: 9781683502241
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

• Explains why traditional leadership training does not work
• Offers a true understanding of employee engagement
• Demonstrates the role of organizational culture and how to get it right
• Leaders readers to develop a personalized blueprint for change and improvement

Part I

Why Most Leadership Development Doesn’t Work

CHAPTER 1

Managing the Unmanageable

Do you believe that developing your leaders can solve all of your company’s organizational performance issues? Do you hope, like many other executives and entrepreneurs, that the answer is simply to “send them to a class—that will fix them”? This is just plain wrong. There are many issues and problems a business can face, and rolling out a generic training initiative is not always the answer. In reality, the approach that companies take to address any development effort is futile without it being tied to specific learning objectives that are relevant to your company and your company alone.

How often have I sat across the desks of small business owners or CEOs as they told me about employee turnover, communication challenges, and the struggle to hold people accountable for just doing their job? How often have I heard them describe how their business is stagnant—or maybe worse, their profits are down and operating costs are up? The answer is: more often than any of us would like to admit. Particularly disturbing is the fact that these concerns affect every aspect of these leaders’ businesses, including customer service, quality, productivity, and overall effectiveness.

Yet despite these clear, comprehensive challenges, companies and managers often take the wrong approach to leadership development by focusing on trying to teach employees how to manage unmanageable aspects of their job. They champion predictable “training events” in a misguided attempt to help employees wrap their arms around problematic areas that match certain industry buzz words: change management, anyone? How about stress management, or time management?

Some things just can’t be managed, and these programs aren’t focused on the right things. For that reason alone, such training initiatives will not ultimately help companies reach their overall organizational goals in these areas. These programs also won’t help to advance corporate growth strategy in any arena. How could they? The heart of these programs involves taking a solution from somewhere else without any consideration that your organization could have differences—even if they are minor—that render the strategies useless.

The bottom line is this: a two-hour module won’t do it. In order to help employees truly deal with the challenges and complications of their work environment, you must go deeper and get more specific. These issues go far beyond what can be addressed by standardized knowledge and development tools promising quick-fix solutions.

Why One Size Fits One

Every company is trying to solve a specific problem. What problem is your company trying to solve? The reason that most corporate training initiatives fail is that no one ever sits down to determine the answer to that question in advance. Without knowing what needs solving, training won’t engage the correct problem-solving process. Your employees might be using techniques they’ve learned, but failing to apply them to the right problems.

Management expert Harold Stolovitch gets at this reality with his concept of “Telling Ain’t Training.” Most development efforts are simply exercises in “telling”—a facilitator talks at you about scenarios that are likely to be totally unrelated to your organization’s unique issues. What should happen instead is that the “telling” needs to be transformed into connection, education, and application opportunities to develop customized activities that result in long-term behavior change.

To put it more simply, employees need the opportunity to be developed, not trained. You develop people; you train dogs. The difference is that while dogs are simply parroting back an action, people have the ability to apply their learnings to specific situations. You can’t just “rinse and repeat” if your techniques aren’t tied to a specific problem. Parroting back management principles—even if the principles are sound—won’t get your company where you want it to go, but applying the right principles for your company will. Basic principles don’t change much over time, but the application of those principles needs to be ever-changing to fit individual situations.

The application part of the leadership development puzzle is critical. I often tell teams I’m working with in this context that if they don’t think I’m right then go apply it. Then come back and tell me that I’m wrong. I advise them to tie the technique to their specific problem, then “rinse and revise” until they get where they’re trying to go. In truth, I hope that they do tell me I’m wrong—then we’ll have a conversation that’s based on what’s actually happening. It’s the dialogue that results from education and application that leads to true change. You need to assess what truly needs to be done, and then reinforce the learning.

Workshops aren’t really the problem—the problem is that most workshops aren’t designed with your company’s issues in mind. They’re one size fits all, when in reality, one size only fits one. What really needs to happen is that every workshop must be designed to address the problem that your company is trying to solve. Leadership development workshops should reflect a theme that’s only meaningful to your company.

Here’s a case in point:

One company that I worked with chose the theme “I’m Possible.” The theme was not an “off the shelf” program, but one that emerged after several months of working closely with the company’s management team to discover together what problem they were trying to solve.

This particular company had previously created a tradeshow initiative called “Follow Possible.” The initiative had a two-pronged mission: to encourage potential customers to better understand certain innovative areas that the company was working toward, and to follow the possibilities of new strategies for future growth.

The “Follow Possible” theme resonated with employees because of the cultural references to the television series and movies that shared a similar name: “Mission Impossible.” The theme evoked a sense of teams working together to overcome difficult challenges and unlikely odds, so we decided to leverage this commonality to address the company’s specific challenges.

Because of the company’s successful history with “Follow Possible,” the “I’m Possible” theme offered a catchy way for senior management to capture the spirit of current initiatives while spinning it into something new. By morphing the feeling of “Impossible” to “I’m Possible,” the company was able to provide employees with a sense of self-empowerment and possibility. It was the right choice for this particular management team, because it brought together their unique corporate history around a theme that was already familiar to employees, yet the revised spin made it fresh and relevant, Mission Impossible style.

Here’s another example:

A new CEO came to the helm of a company that was struggling with revenues, employee morale, and community perception. The CEO recognized the potential within the organization, but needed a way to harness the power of employees and managers alike. There was only one problem: while they were a clinical organization focused on the mission of helping people, they were failing to act like a revenue-generating one.

What was needed were leaders who would actively embrace change within the company. This company did not need generic initiatives about change management, but a series of leadership development workshops designed to spur people to action in the context of what that organization was all about.

The resulting program was called “LEAP”—“Leaders Execute and Perform”—with the mantra: “You can’t jump a chasm in two small steps—it takes a LEAP!” All leadership development efforts were inextricably linked to the specific initiative that this company was trying to solve: management recognized that it would take a leap of faith to get to a new direction.

Both the “I’m Possible” and “LEAP” themes told stories that worked for these particular companies—and these companies alone. The concepts behind these themes will never exist again in the same way for any other organization, because there will never be the identical players, barriers, and conditions that brought these themes to life. You need to find a way to do the same, but differently—that’s the only way that your company can hope to manage the unmanageable.

CHAPTER 2

Ten Myths about Developing Leaders

Part of the problem for companies trying to find solutions to organizational performance issues is that the promised value of generic leadership development programs has been accepted by corporate decision makers. Generalized programs are sold under the premise that they hold the key to whatever ails any company, regardless of each company’s unique circumstances.

To understand the problem with buying into this erroneous belief, you must first understand the difference between what you may have been told about standardized training programs and the reality of them. Let’s debunk ten of the most popular myths about common training programs.

Myth #1: What Works For GE or Disney Will Work for You

A cookie-cutter approach to developing your employees that assumes what works somewhere else, like GE or Disney, will work for your company is never going to work. The same applies to the “big-box” training providers with 50 to 100 course libraries packaged ready to roll out and “fix” every imaginable management challenge for every size and type of business – they just don’t work either. How do you know that you even need the boxed competencies—which by the way are very broad and lack specificity—if you haven’t done your homework to find out what problem you really need to solve?

There’s nothing that you can buy in a box, or in a canned speech or generic workshop, that will work for every company—no off-the-shelf program is ever going to fit. Whatever problems Disney had when they developed their solutions are not the same problems that your company is facing—and Disney’s problems are different than GE’s. The culture, the management, the employees, and the specific business model used in your company all make your challenges unique. Why wouldn’t you need unique solutions as well?

Myth #2: Training Can Fix Hiring Mistakes

It can’t. If a person isn’t a good fit for a position, training isn’t going to help. Hiring managers often gravitate toward hiring people like themselves. They are looking for a “mini-me” instead of thinking about what qualities represent the right skill set for the position. This is a hiring mistake that training can’t fix.

Here’s an example: I spoke with a CEO recently who was complaining about two account people he had hired. He needed problem-solving strategic thinkers, yet his new hires didn’t excel in these areas. When grilled further, the CEO revealed that he had not asked one strategic question during the interviewing process—he had asked for information that could easily be found on a resume. He didn’t ask what the candidates’ actual responsibilities were versus others on their teams—he focused more on the interviewees’ tone of voice and whether they had experience working with clients.

In short, he was more concerned with hiring someone like him than with finding the right competencies and skill sets for the job. The CEO did not interview these candidates for the qualities that he actually needed for the position. This was a hiring mistake—you don’t want to start off with the wrong people in your key positions and then expect training to fix it.

Myth #3: Training Can Fix Problems with Company Culture, Mistrust in the Leadership Team, Or Issues with Staffing Levels and Workload

These issues reflect underlying corporate principles that need to change—band-aid solutions in the form of training won’t work. Company culture is a broad issue that requires management to fully understand how it’s presently affecting employees in order to change it.

If the staff mistrusts the leadership team, then the problem needs to be fixed at the grassroots level—education is needed to understand this, not training. Imbalances in staffing levels or workload reflect cultural problems, and the solutions to these problems are individual to each company. Management must understand the reasons behind problems in these areas to solve them appropriately. Simply trying to apply general training principles to your teams, without getting to the bottom of what has caused these problems in the first place, will be ineffective and a waste of money.

Myth #4: There Is a Course Toto Make an Unhappy, Disengaged Employee or a Dysfunctional Team Turn the Corner Overnight

Harvard Business School professor and world-renowned change expert John Kotter recommends an eight-step change process in his book, Leading Change. Whether or not your company agrees with Kotter’s specific steps, just looking at the types of actions that are involved in truly making change in an organization helps to reinforce the point that current training programs are unrealistic.

Kotter recommends c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Why Most Leadership Development Doesn’t Work
• Part II: The Consequences of Taking the Wrong Approach to Development
• Part III: Learn to FUEL Your Organization to the Next Level
• The Final Word