The Leadership Challenge “Invest how?”
Richard Lynch and Jim Dowling, Co-Founders
Technological advances such as IoT, AI, web services and cloud-based infrastructure are revolutionizing the way work gets done. Disrupters are capitalizing on new technologies to the detriment of their competitors. Followers are finding it difficult to learn quickly, imagine new ways of getting work done, and setting new pathways to prosperity.
How do adaptive organizations sense and respond so quickly? Their leaders have created organizations that think and learn forward. They have put day-to-day operations on autopilot and continuously evolve their vision and their ability to create that vision.
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CEO’s tell us that traditional leadership development programs are not preparing leaders for these challenges in a meaningful way. How then could a new approach accelerate the ability to learn forward?
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American computer scientist Alan Kay, once said “Context is equal to IQ 80 points.” We agree but more importantly, we have shown that learning in your operational context creates a learning organization. Our consulting models always included the same pattern: theory, example, method, application. We taught leaders what to do, provided them with tools and coaching and let them do the work with their teams with our facilitation and coaching, they learned in the doing.
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We suggest reimagining leadership development, carrying forward methods that advance the reimagined system, casting off what will not, and creating new capabilities.
A good place to start is adopting new Leadership Development Principles:
- Leadership: Leaders are everywhere, disregard title, focus on leadership
- Context: Learning is immediately actionable, learning in your organization’s context
- Investment: Invest in your people now, let them rise to leadership positions; open self-development, coached learning communities
- Time to ROI: Formalize learning to accelerate leaders’ transformational work. Coach action learning in the flow of work, programmatically and opportunistically
- Scaling: Self-paced learning is immediately available to leaders at all levels. Coached action capability expands over time, becomes part of the culture
- Leverage: Purposefully engage individuals and teams to leverage learning immediately while organizational learning and culture builds leverage over time
Harvard Business Review author Michael Beer and his colleagues point out “companies are not getting the return they expect on their investment in training and education. By investing in training that is not likely to yield a good return, senior executives and their HR professionals are complicit in what we have come to call The Great Training Robbery.”
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We believe this will change, as McKinsey suggests, when CHROs and CFOs up their traditional partnership by helping organizations identify and build capabilities that prepare for the future. Together, they need to link learning directly to individual and operational performance improvements. This will require that they invest differently:
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- Recognize that your context will change, and your response will benefit from adaptable learning content and learning delivery modes that adapt to challenges, culture, and evolving technology.
- Build a “think and learn forward culture” to solve today’s problems and build tomorrow’s capabilities at the same time.
- Measure the ROI of leader learning in terms of leadership performance delivering the tangible and intangible results that are hallmarks of great companies leveraging all of their assets.
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Today’s technology makes such community learning a practical reality using at-hand technologies that eliminate barriers including distance, time zones, travel time, interruption of daily work and reliance on external instructors and facilitators.
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To see what this learning experience looks like, click here