The direction of the research on leadership styles suggests that most styles of leadership are more personality based at their core than directed toward performance as an effective leader per se. In essence, managers tend to “lead” the way they do because it is their primary interpersonal nature, i.e., there is NO correlation between one’s style of leadership, leadership potential, and one’s leadership performance.
Centuries of military tradition advocates that if you want to ensure real leadership, then one must start with the realistic premise that “leadership” can be taught. It is best not to assume some are born to lead, though some personalities are better predisposed to demonstrate leadership qualities when exposure to challenging situations requiring them to lead others and are taught the knowledge of consequences of behavior as it relates to getting others to follow one’s lead under adverse scenarios.
If you leave it to the average manager, they will rely on their familiar or personality type to “manage others.” This leaves us in a quandary because the best research in high performing leaders would reveal that most “leadership styles” would, generally apply, yet, not be considered “effective leadership approaches” in the workplace.
We need Learning Leaders who have the ability to stay flexible, grow from mistakes, and handle a magnitude and diverse range of challenges."
Agile Leadership is a leadership style where the leader values the need to adapt to constantly changing conditions, with the ability to embrace new effective behaviors based on new requirements and the challenges of a chaotic, even volatile marketplace driving a magnitude of change, with the potential to confound by its daunting complexity and uncertainty.
Developing leadership potential truly matters – yet more than half of leadership development initiatives fail.
What does it take to unlock your organization’s leadership potential?
The four core beliefs associated with utilizing leadership potential across an organization include:
- focusing on the shifts that matter, linked to value
- engaging a critical mass of pivotal influencers across the organization
- engineering programs to maximize behavioral change
- embedding and measuring the change
How do you make this happen in practice?
Our approach centers on the critical outputs typical for each of four phases. It needs to become a succession planning and development process rather than a program. There is no rush. However, the first three typically take two or three years to reach your entire organization. The development approach needs to be customized to your organization.
Diagnose: Determine the gap between where you want to go
Our Goal Alignment Program and our Ladder of Leadership model tightly links to the strategy and context. Together these programs prioritize the three to five “what-to-change” shifts (behaviors, skills, mindsets) that the leadership program will trigger. Quantify the leadership potential and the chasm at each level in your organization and assess current leadership development initiatives.
Design and develop: Decide what you need to get there
This phase involves designing the interventions required for all target groups. Generally, we group leadership developing in three levels: manager/director; senior managers/vice president; and C-Suite. From there, we create the leadership development journey by the group. This encompasses all content, defines target participants (who, how much, when), and selects the initial ones. It also includes developing reinforcing mechanisms (change story, symbolic actions, system changes) as well as the signed-off business case (including target impact, work plan, budget and organizational requirements to deliver the program).
We provide a universal language that your people can use to discuss what they do best as it relates to starting or growing an endeavor.
Deliver: Moving to action
At this stage, you can deliver the leadership development intervention and embed it in the broader organizational system. Specifically, you provide the program across all cohorts, employ modern adult learning principles (field, forum, and coaching), apply system embedment (communication, role modelling, and reinforcing mechanisms, including inserting the leadership model into all talent processes), and establish governance and measurement at multiple levels of the program.
Once established, you manage the process. We assist with the assessment of new individuals entering the program. Also, we can help identify specific learning for everyone to enhance the development of his or her unique talent stack.
Develop: Keeping the momentum going
Leadership-development efforts have always foundered when participants learn new things but then return to a rigid organization that disregards their efforts for change or even actively works against them. Given the pace of change today, adapting systems, processes, and culture that can support change-enabling leadership development is critically important.
Organizations must endeavor to continue evolving the program as the organization changes its strategy and context. Among other things, they can achieve this by continuously tracking its impact, reinforcing critical behavioral changes, developing and applying a clear plan for program graduates (yearly refresh, retention policies, etc.), and regularly reassessing the organizational leadership potential and requirements given the context.
Here are three essential elements to keep the momentum going with your entire leadership group:
- “Build safety,” making people feel like they belong. You will not get the best out of people if they think they must compete for status. Cohesion happens not when members of a group are smarter but when they are lit up by clear, steady signals of safe
- Successful groups share vulnerability, including the leaders. People admit when they need help and acknowledge failures. They can talk openly and honestly about mistakes that have been made, and that way the whole group learns and does better next time.
- Establish the common purpose, so all participants see a future together.
No “silver bullet”
McKinsey found that much needs to happen for leadership development to work at scale, and there is no “silver bullet” that will singlehandedly make the difference between success and failure.
Leadership development significantly enables organizational performance. However, McKinsey’s research indicates that organizations should avoid following a generic approach that most favor. Too often, it proves to be piecemeal, narrow, short-lived and misses objectives and performance goals. Instead, organizations should embrace a more tailored and comprehensive approach that develops leadership effectiveness at scale. It requires effort – but the payback is significant.
Ladder of Leadership: New Research Unveiled
A behavioral competency model for driving top performance at three corporate leadership levels.
In the paper we share the competencies that are:
- Always On: Only two behaviors from manager to C-Suite
- Leap: “Bridging” behaviors for moving between each management level
- Lead: Unique behaviors for every stage of management
- Leave Behinds: The “once and done” list— good only for where you are, not where you’re going
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