Investing in Leadership | Featured Article of the Month

EZINE_Header

Inside The Edge

About
The Featured Article

PEN_to_Paper95

If you want the best insight into a diverse range of business topics, then our Featured Article is for you. Every article addresses a key contemporary issue that plagues the modern workplace and seeks to provide you with a practical and easily applied solution. Staying on the leading edge of today’s best business practices is crucial for success in any state of the economy; our Featured Article can help you not only get to this leading edge but stay there with confidence heading forward.

Investing in Leadership

“The Power to Think and Act Beyond”

“Leadership can be said to be everything and nothing. It is everything because it can be found everywhere in organizations, not just at the top. Leadership is everything because it is infused in all that we do…. All individual behavior has leadership implications. Because leadership is based on action, it emerges as a function of participation and interaction. Given this description, how can leadership be nothing? Leadership is nothing in the sense that it seems impossible to define completely. Decades of scientific study have yet to yield a single definition that fully captures the nature of leadership, much less articulate a definitive approach to developing it. Perhaps it is impossible to define leadership in words, but we agree we know it when we see it.”
David Day and Stanley Halpin

Leadership is a way of doing things – a mindset. Rather than a position or title, it is an approach and an attitude. The value of developing leadership is critical to success both for individuals in their careers and organizations in their business strategy.

We find that leadership development is generally seen as a “soft” skill rather than one that will make or break the organization’s ability to compete or the individual’s ability to move their career forward. Executives find it much easier to commit to an investment in equipment than a program to develop their people. Similarly, people look at technical training as the most impactful training option. Leadership development becomes an “afterthought” investment rather than a core strategy. As a result, our feeling is that much of the monies invested to date in leadership development have been made in a poor manner – like any other investment, put money into something not well planned and expect less than attractive returns. Such a move is speculation rather than investment.

Engagement and productivity has suffered – declining significantly in the past ten years – and we believe much of the responsibility can be placed on poor investment in developing leadership in people. Leadership is learned. We need to take a more investment-based approach to leadership development for our people and companies.

Investing in leadership development is best described as the expansion of capacity. Whether from the perspective of the individual or organization, investing in building leadership capability is about expanding the ability to gain sustainable competitive advantage.

The first question prior to making an investment in leadership development is why you or your company thinks that it is important.

Leadership is a much-“Googled” word with more than 439 million results. An initiative in putting a leadership development program in place is most often done for the wrong reasons. Rarely is such a move connected to strategy. The real answer to the need for investing in developing leadership capacity is that it is critical for achieving competitiveness (almost 80% of respondents to a Center for Creative Leadership survey cited this as the most important reason) whether to realize the results of a strategy or to build a successful career. Strategies are simply ink on paper – it is leadership that will ensure the implementation and execution to achieve results.

The linkage of leadership development to strategy should be the first step in the decision process. Again, whether we are looking at the benefit from an individual or an organizational viewpoint, we need to answer why the investment is important and that can only be done when connected to where we are now and where we want to be.

By making the connection between strategy and the future and to where we are today, we can answer the second question of a good investment in terms of “in what ways must leadership make us different for future success?” You cannot achieve sustainable success doing what you do today. Leadership development is about change to realize future results. Answering this question keys in on the areas of competencies that are needed to win in the future – the skills and capabilities that will make a difference. We need to know what we need before we start investing.

Now we know why leadership development is needed and in what ways we need to develop. The next question revolves around our ability to learn. Are our organization and our people ready for development? We often defer training and development opportunities because it is easier to stay in our comfort zone. Sadly, we avoid potentially rich learning experiences and find by surprise that other people and companies investing in leadership development pass us by. We need to connect people to the bottom-line outcomes of leadership capability to apply new behaviors to achieve greater results.

Once we determine that the organization and people are ready for development, the question then becomes how to make it happen.

While my background is in the investment business, as a chartered financial analyst my eye is always on the ability to structure investment to deliver the best overall return over time. What I have found in leadership development is that investment principles are seldom applied. I distinctly remember a CEO smugly responding to my question about his organization’s method of developing leaders as “We send our people away to (a high-priced training institution); a wonderful experience for 10 days.” I asked him about the return on this expensive investment and he couldn’t answer and waved the question away as if unimportant. Status should not be the prerequisite for investment. The real impact of workshops and conferences is generally fleeting. Research has shown that singular events (no matter how wonderful) generally have about a 6% likelihood of creating a sustainable impact in someone’s behavior.

For most “leadership-event” participants (even the best programs) return to their work and are thrown back into the mix and do not have the support to ensure their learning is applied in practical terms to what they are actually doing. It is similar to sending an athlete to a training camp for a week where specific skills are taught and then providing no further coaching and ongoing practice to ensure the realization of the targeted training.

Research in leadership development best practices stresses investment against four key areas:

Any investment in leadership development should include assessment (understanding where you are), challenge (goals for growth), and support (ongoing coaching to instill learning)
Learning is amplified where there is a variety of approaches – combining several different types of learning greatly increases the ability to sustain new skills
Context matters in that learning must be applied to actual situations and not just in theory
Time is key – learning needs to happen over time (and this is shown in studies that report learning over at least a one-year period has more than an a 80% likelihood of creating lasting behavioral changes)

The investment in leadership development that works most effectively is one that is structured as a systematic, integrated, and ongoing learning experience.
“The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been.” Henry Kissinger

Many organizations are making excellent investments in providing leadership development programs that will make a difference for both their people and their organization.

The AC Group, a regional consortium of public accounting firms, is one such organization that saw the benefit of investing for the future. In setting up a three-year leadership development program for their young professionals, Bob Caswill (the AC Group’s Chief Executive Officer) described the partners’ objectives for the program as “building a culture that would attract and retain quality young professionals by enabling them to build their individual leadership skills and see a path to fulfill their career aspirations with the company.” In doing so, the AC Group clearly defined their people as the future of the organization’s success and investing in developing leaders would set them apart competitively. Professionals too often focus just on technical capabilities and Bob and his partners clearly made the investment in leadership skills as a way to make a difference. The program did not just look at the short-term but provided an ongoing learning experience that supported the development and application of skills that would last over time. The group took a proactive approach rather than just waiting for turnover.

Alice Leverman, the CEO of the South Shore District Health Authority, faced fiscal constraints like all other healthcare organizations but knew from reaching out to her organization that leadership was an investment that would make a real difference. In surveying the people at all levels, Alice highlighted that an investment in developing leadership would support “the right actions to engage and commit people to make sustainable behavioral shifts that would support the transformation of the organization”. Again, Alice opted for an ongoing program that focused on learning and application to actual work that connected culture to leadership actions.

In a totally different industry, Carol Lynde, the President and COO of Brandes Investment Partners Canada, made the investment in the leadership development of the firm’s managers to be able to provide the foundation for organizational growth. By helping people grow, the organization would also grow. As in the previous examples, the program Carol invested in is ongoing, customized to the strategy of the firm, and focused on applying practical learning to actual work. In the investment business, success is often just by the numbers. Carol highlighted the investment in people as inherent in the ongoing success of the firm – not just the production numbers.

What makes the right leadership development investment?

In our opinion, leaders look at how to connect people and strategy. Where is the organization going and what competencies in people are needed to create success in the future? With this knowledge, a leadership development program can be customized to the strategy and the future state that combines best practices like ongoing training and coaching, practical work applications, job experiences that puts learning to real situations, challenging growth goals, and measurement of outcomes.

For the participant, the best leadership development option will involve and commitment. A week away sounds great but the real learning is gained from a regular, ongoing program that helps build the competencies that will make a difference in careers over the long term.

One of the key aspects of engagement is the ability to make a meaningful impact. Developing leadership capacity is one of the most valuable ways to achieve that competitive contribution. Invest in your people and yourself to gain the best long term return.

For further information on our customized corporate leadership development programs, please contact Jamie O’Neill at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and make a difference for your organization.