Rethinking Leadership Development
An entire industry has been built up around leadership development that rests on a soft foundation tied to the traditional Industrial Era model of organizations. The first questionable practice is determining who gets enrolled in this development. Most people in these programs are judged to be “high potential employees” based on today’s criteria and not what might be in ten or 20 years. Or they are already in leadership positions having been promoted to the level of their incompetence and are struggling. There is also a second even more fundamental flaw beyond assuming all leadership resides at the top of a hierarchy of authority. Increasingly, work is done in teams, many self-managed. This then gets to a third flaw — these programs are not really leadership development but are “leader development” focused on training people to exercise their authority and judgement to greater degrees as they are promoted up the organization hierarchy.
By focusing on the person as hierarchical leader, there is an implicit bias toward positional powers with some mention of personal powers because passive-aggressive behaviors can easily overrun positional powers alone. But again, this overlooks how teams are now increasingly being used where there is often not a single leader but several variations such as participatory, shared, or rotating leadership roles. In this view of work, the leader may only truly be recognized on the organization chart and the leader role becomes much more dynamic in practice. Further, power changes with positional powers only important in clearing barriers and personal powers becoming more important, topics often overlooked in leadership development programs. There is also a new power — that of Group Power — that becomes important in group settings. The two group powers are rarely discussed in leadership forums since the focus remains on the single leader as a person, not a group activity. Briefly, these group powers arise from collaboration where the brainpower of the team members working together is greater than the sum of their individual abilities. This is the 2+2=5 phenomenon that arises when people are called together to brainstorm and solve problems. The other group power is actually a precursor to the first — Convening Power (Block, 2008). This is the ability to call people together in the first place to focus on an issue. This is one of the powers of the Purpose Alignment Team where they are not responsible for solving the problem, only that a group is convened to address the problem once identified.
Getting back to the confusion of enrolling leaders in a “leadership development” program is the direct connection between a leader and the functional execution of leadership. The increasing occurrence of participatory, shared, and rotating leaders called traditional leadership theories into question where there was a single leader and multiple followers. This conflict led to creating a higher order view of leadership — DAC (direction, alignment, and commitment) Leadership. This is a functional view of leadership where leaders focus on the outcomes of their DAC actions. However, by focusing on the functional activities of leadership one can realize that there are multiple ways of providing this functional activity separate from direct involvement by a designated “leader”.
For example, setting direction may involve a single leader of a team with a deliverable that is then packaged and communicated across the organization. Within this activity there are many ways to think about direction if you were to step back and think about the details. How is direction documented for communication? What are the artifacts that support the direction? This is where strategy execution often fails. Developing a strategy and communicating it is not enough. What remains as visible reminders to reinforce the message? How are work activities and behaviors altered? What supports these changes are often more important than who leads the effort. Similarly, alignment is a key leadership function, but it can expand beyond a single leader construct to be replaced by a Purpose Alignment Team that does not manage work but sees that problems are addressed, and work processes are aligned with the organization’s purpose. Technology is also playing a larger role in clarifying direction and aligning the organization’s work processes independent of any leader’s direct involvement. Information transparency also shifts power from leaders to those who need the information to perform their job roles.
The third part of DAC leadership (commitment) often involves the soft skills that are covered in leadership development programs. However, these skills are too often framed within the leader-follower power imbalance instead of moving to higher Levels of Involvement for employees. This shifts the discussion to followership, a topic that often exists in the backwaters of leadership development. Commitment also gets back to alignment, not of work processes, but of the employees’ values, desires, and identity with that of the organization. This is much more than what a leader can do alone since it involves recruitment & selection, job role assignments, and performance management, which is an entire subject itself when removed from Industrial Era Thinking.
The opportunity then shifts from leader development of a select few “high potential” employees to leadership development across the organization. Rethinking leadership within the DAC framework shifts the focus entirely from what someone does to the outcome of that activity. With this shift in thinking comes much greater awareness of what drives DAC leadership outcomes and how many more levers are available for improving the delivery of the organization’s purpose.
In what ways are you limiting your thinking about leaders versus leadership outcomes?
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