How Leadership Development Programs Can Succeed

by Seth Sinclair

The January 2014 issue of McKinsey Quarterly included an article that exposed what may be called the “dirty little secret” of the training industry.  (McKinsey Quarterly is the business publication of McKinsey and Company, a global management-consulting firm.) Despite the fact that American companies spend nearly $14 billion every year on leadership development programs, the article argues many such programs fail to develop strong and capable leaders. 

In their article, “Why Leadership-development Programs Fail,” authors Pierre Gurdjian, Thomas Halbelsen, and Kevin Lane describe four common mistakes those who organize and develop leadership development programs make—and provide useful strategies to avoid those pitfalls.  The issues they identify include:

Overlooking context: Leaders who do well in one kind of situation don’t necessarily do well in another.  Gurdjian, Halbelson, and Lane cite the example of a CEO who “had an outstanding record when markets were growing quickly, but…failed to provide clear direction or impose financial discipline on the group’s business units during the most recent economic downturn.”  Instead, the CEO continued to encourage innovation and new thinking, as he had previously done, until he was replaced for underperforming.  To combat this, the authors believe, companies need to precisely define the skills they require of their leaders at this point in time, and to develop a program that will teach those particular skills.

Decoupling reflection from real work: Some leadership programs offer participants the opportunity to step back from their day-to-day tasks and look at the big picture.  On the other hand, write the authors, “adults typically retain just 10 percent of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing.”  It’s difficult to both push training participants to reflect while also giving them the opportunity to develop their skills through real work experiences.  The solution?  “Companies should strive to make every major business project a leadership-development opportunity as well, and to integrate leadership-development components into the projects themselves.”

Underestimating mind-sets: Reaching new levels of leadership performance, the authors acknowledge, requires uncomfortable changes to behavior.  Deeply held mindsets need to shift—and trainers need to go deeper into the thoughts and actions of leaders in order to change the way people see the world and their values.  “No pain, no gain”, they write, is as true in executive training as it is in training world-class athletes.

Failing to measure results: The authors’ final point is one we at Sinclair Advisory Group have frequently made: that “companies pay lip service to the importance of developing leadership skills, but have no evidence to quantify the value of their investment.”  Participant feedback is not enough to evaluate leadership development programs—organizations must assess the extent of behavioral change the program has provided, perhaps with 360-degree feedback exercises at regular intervals.  Another good suggestion is to monitor participants’ career development after the program compared to employees who did not take part.  They also suggest that business metric impacts, such as cost savings and additional sales, can also quantify leadership program success.

While the authors mention coaching at several points during the article, their focus is generally on larger-scale leadership development programs for groups.  It seems to us, however, that one-on-one executive coaching is a proven way to avoid each of the pitfalls they cite, and to increase the likelihood that the billions of dollars invested by companies and organizations are spent wisely.

Great executive coaches do not see themselves as teachers, but as partners in the journeys of those they coach.  By helping clients define their own goals, asking the kinds of questions that help them understand the issues they face, and supporting them as they develop plans to solve problems, executive coaches are able to understand the context in which individual leaders operate.  They are also able to give leaders space to reflect on their lives and philosophies and to integrate those reflections into a real work context.

By looking at their clients’ interactions with others, and their entire lives and lifestyles (including wellness issues), coaches learn how to understand their clients’ mindsets and how their personalities and actions help them or hinder them.  Only this level of understanding can help leaders change unwelcome behaviors, and get them out of real and perceived ruts.   

And finally, the best executive coaches understand that bottom line of any coaching program is tangible results for both the individual and the organization.  In a previous blog post, we wrote about the importance of developing a coaching agreement—the process through which the relationship between a coach, a client, and an organization is designed and planned.  Every coaching agreement should establish the goals and parameters for the coaching relationship, and set expectations—including expectations for concrete results—that drive the relationship forward.

If it is true, as Messrs. Gurdjian, Halbelsen, and Lane suggest, that “only 7 percent of senior managers polled by a UK (United Kingdom) business school think their companies develop global leaders effectively,” then companies and organizations need to look more deeply into the use of executive coaches as partners for their leaders and candidates for leadership.  Coaching can address each of the issues the authors identify and provide an ideal strategy to increase the odds of successful leadership development.