Everyone Understands, Few Learn....................Leadership

This is the great dilemma of training and transforming leaders.

Everyone understands the information.

But yet there is very little or no behaviour change.

McKinsey found that 70% of Leadership Development programs FAIL to change leaders' behaviours.

To us, One only learns when they can DO

Marshall Goldsmith beautifully described the problem:

leaders often fail because they assume understanding equals action, much
like knowing about healthy eating doesn't automatically lead to being fit. 

For companies to get success (behaviour change, ROI etc) from their leadership development efforts there needs to be a radical change in how leaders are 'trained' (I rather use 'transformed').

Several companies had me do an audit on their leadership development programs to figure out how they can improve the results from their leadership development efforts.

Here are the 5 Major Reasons:

1) Wrong Content : Most programs tend to focus heavily on providing information and knowledge about leadership and related topics.

However, new knowledge does not translate into behaviour change.

For example, knowing about Emotional Intelligence does not improve participants EQ and does not translate into more empathy and better behaviours.

Mindset and Beliefs have a greater impact on behaviour change but most 

programs are very deficient in providing tools, techniques and content 

to change Mindset and Beliefs.

2) Too Short : Most programs are not given the required time to effect the behaviour change they wish to achieve. Most programs are still focused on cramming in as much information into the shortest period of time and that is mainly a function of cost and budgeting.

If behaviour change is the goal and the biggest impact on behaviour change is Mindset and Beliefs, programs need more time because Mindset shifts do take time to happen.

3) Improper Diagnosis : Many managers who appoint participants to attend leadership development programs are poor at articulating the challenges and growth opportunities for participants. The behavioural challenges are not expressed clearly and ofter times there is no development plan indicating the before and after behaviours.

The use of popular psychometrics are also not adding a lot of value as they tend not to be data rich for the purposes of transforming behaviours. Popular psychometrics are used in most cases to reinforce current behaviours rather than provide data for direction in the leadership development process.

Popular psychometrics also do not provide data on the drivers and 

origins of the current behaviours or what might prevent future 

desired behaviours.

4) Facilitators : Our audit showed that the majority of facilitators used, had no experience and certification in behaviour change. This is somewhat related to problem #1 which is content and most facilitators simply presented content via presentations, exercises and handouts.

Their aim was to deliver content, not change behaviours.

5) HR/L&D Team: the heads and team members of the HR/L&D teams we audited did not have much knowledge about behaviour change, mindset shifts and belief change. They were of the opinion that having knowledgable facilitators who can share information and knowledge would lead to the desired behaviour changes.

They had little or no experience in curriculum development and thus the leadership development programs were poorly structured. They had a list of desired programs but showed little cognisance of pre-requisites and which programs must be preceded by others for them to have maximum effect.

For example, one company ran a Conflict Management program before the did the Emotional Intelligence program.

Emotional Intelligence should be a pre-requisite to Conflict Management.

Millions are spent and wasted every year on leadership development.

Fixing these 5 problems can create the desired behaviour change and generate a Return on Investment.