Welcome to The Debate. Good to be here. Today
we are opening the hood on a machine that really
drives the global corporate economy. And I have
to say it is a very expensive machine. We're
talking about the industry of leadership development.
Expensive is an understatement. It really is.
I mean, depending on whose numbers you trust.
Organizations globally are spending somewhere
north of $350 billion every single year on training,
retreats, executive coaching, you name it. It's
a staggering amount of capital. And yet, the
source material we're looking at today suggests
there is a massive problem with the return on
that investment. Right. I mean, if you spent
that kind of money on R &D or manufacturing and
got the results we see in leadership training.
You'd fire the entire department. Exactly. The
literature points to this persistent, almost
frustrating paradox. We have smart people. We
have expensive training. And yet there's this
gaping chasm between knowing what a good leader
should do and actually doing it in the real world.
So the central question we're debating today
is why? And specifically, where do we point the
finger? Do we point it at the person we're training?
Or do we point it at the system that person has
to operate in? That is the core tension. And
I'm taking the position that leadership is fundamentally
a human endeavor. It's about the individual.
It's about psychology, personal capacity, and
what the texts call self -efficacy. If you want
better leadership, you have to build better people.
It's the old great person theory. You need a
hero or at least someone capable of heroic acts.
And I'm taking the position that the great person
approach is exactly why we're flushing billions
of dollars down the drain. I believe the material
clearly shows that leadership is a collective
process. It relies on systems, on culture, on
context. If you take a brilliant individual and
drop them into a broken system, the system wins
every time. You can't fix the organization by
just polishing the cogs. Polishing the cogs,
I think that's a bit reductive, but let's get
into the argument. Let's do it. I want to ground
us in the definition of the work itself. When
we look at the academic literature, you know,
the foundational texts on this subject, how is
leadership development actually defined? It isn't
defined as organizational consulting. It's defined
explicitly as the process which helps expand
the capacity of individuals to perform in leadership
roles. That is the traditional definition, yes.
Well, it's the definition because it's the mechanism
of action. Think about it. You can't train a
department to have empathy. You can't train a
policy to have a vision. You can only train a
human being. And the material points to the Royal
Military Academy Sandhurst as one of the ultimate
examples of this. Sandhurst is legendary, sure,
but it's also a military academy. It's a bit
of an extreme example, isn't it? But the principles
apply everywhere. Sandhurst doesn't operate on
the assumption that this system will make you
a leader. No, they operate on a model of intense
selection and individual potential. They argue
that you have to identify specific psychological
traits before you even begin the training. They're
looking for things like high achievement drive,
openness to experience, and specifically an internal
locus of control. Let's pause on internal locus
of control for a second. Just for the listeners,
we should probably unpack that. Sure. It's a
psychological term. If you have an internal locus
of control, you believe that events in your life
are caused by your own actions. You're the driver.
If you have an external locus of control, you
believe life happens to you. Luck, fate, the
boss's mood. The argument here is that you can't
lead if you don't believe you have agency. Development,
in my view, is the process of strengthening that
internal psychology. It's about building what
what Albert Bandura calls self -efficacy. Bandura
is a heavy hitter in psychology. He is. And his
concept of self -efficacy is absolutely crucial
here. It's the rock solid belief in one's own
capabilities to organize and execute a course
of action. That belief happens inside a brain.
It doesn't happen in the hallways. It doesn't
happen in the employee handbook. It is a deeply
personal, psychological revolution. If you don't
have that individual spark, no amount of systemic
support is going to make you a leader. Okay,
I don't disagree that confidence is better than
insecurity, but I think you're painting a very
romantic picture of the hero leader. You're describing
a model where we pluck some special person, fill
them with Sandhurst -style grit, and drop them
into a company to save the day. But here's the
cold water, and it comes straight from the data.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
published a study in 2015 that analyzed traditional
classroom -style training, which is, you know,
exactly what you're advocating for. I have a
feeling I'm not going to like this number. You
really aren't. They estimated that as little
as 15 % of the learning from that training results
in sustained behavioral change. 15! 1 -5! Just
think about that ROI. If an auto manufacturer
built cars where only 15 % of them started when
you turned the key, they would be out of business
in a week. Yet, in leadership development, we
just accept this failure rate. This is what the
management expert Henry Mintzberg calls the knowing
-doing gap. We fill these individuals with theories,
we give them self -efficacy, and then they go
back to their desks and nothing happens. Okay,
but we have to ask why nothing happens. Is that
a failure of the focus on the individual, or
is that just bad teaching? I mean, maybe the
seminar was boring. It's the destination. The
material sites Baldwin and Ford from 1988, and
this isn't new information, by the way, and their
findings are just damning for your position.
They prove that the transfer of training depends
heavily, perhaps primarily, on the support for
behavioral change from the leader's supervisor.
The supervisor. Right. The environment. You take
a manager, let's call him Bob, you send Bob to
a retreat. He gets his expanded capacity. He
comes back fired up, ready to lead with empathy
and vision. But his boss says, that's cute, Bob,
but we have a deadline. Stop talking and get
back to work. Bob's individual capacity is instantly
erased by the systemic context. The swamp of
the organization just swallows him up. I understand
the swamp argument. I really do. But if we follow
that logic to its conclusion, we stop training
Bob entirely. We just complain about the swamp.
The literature makes a clear distinction between
leader development, what I'm talking about, developing
human capital, and leadership development, which
is what you're talking about, developing connections.
I argue that if you stop focusing on the individual
because the system is hard, you are surrendering
agency. You are saying the machine is more powerful
than the human. I just don't accept that. A true
leader, properly developed, looks at the swamp
and decides to drain it. That sounds great on
a motivational poster, but in reality, Bob just
quits. Or worse, he conforms. Let's look at the
mechanism of learning itself, because I think
this proves my point about the individual being
central. The material references David Kolb deeply.
He's the titan of experiential learning. His
model is, you know, the gold standard for how
adults grow. Kolb is valid. I'm not disputing
Kolb. Well, let's look at his model. It is entirely
individual -centric. He outlines four stages
of learning. Stage one, concrete experience.
You do something. Stage two, observation and
reflection. You think about what happened. Stage
three, forming abstract concepts. You build a
mental theory. And stage four, testing in new
situations. Look at stage two and three, reflection
and conceptualization. Those are solitary cognitive
acts. The system cannot reflect for you. The
team cannot form a concept in your brain. If
you don't focus on the individual's cognitive
process, learning literally cannot occur. It's
a biological fact. I'm not saying the individual
doesn't need a functioning brain. I'm saying
your application of Kolb is incomplete because
you are ignoring the fourth stage, testing in
new situations. You can't test a leadership behavior
in a vacuum. You can't practice leading in front
of a mirror. You have to do it with other people.
which then provides data back to the individual
for reflection. But the quality of that testing
phase depends entirely on the collective. The
material explicitly states that effective development
is more likely when it integrates a range of
experiences over a set period, specifically 6
to 12 months. Why does it take a year? It's not
because the individual is slow. It's because
effective testing requires feedback loops. It
requires 360 -degree feedback from peers. It
requires executive coaching. It requires mentoring.
These are all relational dynamics. If I try to
test my new leadership style, say, being more
open to ideas, and my team reacts with hostility
because the culture is toxic, I'm going to learn
the wrong lesson. I'll learn to keep my mouth
shut. Kolb's cycle breaks if the environment
doesn't support the experiment. I think you're
confusing the gym with the athlete. Yes, you
need a gym, the environment, to train. But you're
still training the athlete, the person. The muscle
growth happens in the body, not in the weights.
But let's pivot to how organizations actually
plan for the future. Because I think this is
where the systemic argument really struggles
to explain reality. I'm talking about succession
planning. Ah. the crown prince phenomenon. Call
it what you want, but it's the process of ensuring
the organization survives. Succession planning
is, by definition, the identification of high
potentials, the elite few. The material notes
that in multinational corporations, this involves
very specific curated experiences, international
transfers, cross -departmental rotations. We
send a specific human being, let's call her Jane,
from London to Singapore for two years. Why do
we do that? We're curating the life experience
of a specific vessel, the leader. We aren't trying
to fix the Singapore system. We are trying to
give Jane the perspective she needs to lead.
If leadership was purely collective, we wouldn't
need to move Jane. We just optimize the team
she manages. That is the traditional view, and
it leads to a lot of burned out Janes. I want
to introduce a different concept from the text
that challenges that entire high potential hierarchy.
It's called employeeship. Employeeship. I have
to be honest, it sounds a bit submissive. Like
we're training people to be better worker bees.
It only sounds like that if you're obsessed with
the great man hierarchy. Employeeship has been
particularly successful in Scandinavia, specifically
in Sweden. Now, we know that Scandinavian business
cultures often have a low power distance. That
means the gap between the boss and the worker
is very small. They don't put the leader on a
pedestal, and the material notes that in this
model, the traits of a good leader are recognized
as being not too dissimilar to what it takes
to be a good employee. So everyone is a leader?
That sounds like chaos. If everyone is in charge,
no one is. It's not that everyone is in charge.
It's that the responsibility for the success
of the organization is shared. Instead of taking
the high -potential Jane and putting her in a
special tower with special training, which, by
the way, alienates her from the team, the employeeship
model suggests you bring the leader and the team
together to explore their similarities. You develop
them as a unit. When you focus entirely on the
individual, on the elite, you create a culture
of competition. You create disconnection. But
if you focus on the interpersonal linkages, you
build a resilient web. The Swedish model suggests
the leader is just an employee with a different
set of responsibilities, not a different species
of human. I can see the egalitarian appeal. It
feels very modern. But let's be practical. Organizations
need direction. They need strategy. And that
brings me to the concept of visioning. The material
identifies this as a non -negotiable component
of leadership development, the ability to formulate
a clear image of the aspired future. Sure. You
need a plan. It's more than a plan. It's a dream.
Succession planning relies on what we aspire
to become, not just where we've been. Who generates
that aspiration? A committee doesn't dream. A
system doesn't hallucinate a new future. A person
does. The text emphasizes that you need someone
with the cognitive capacity to project into the
future. That act of imagination is an individual
attribute. You need a person with high openness
to experience and high achievement drive to stand
up and say, follow me, we are going there. If
you rely on the collective, you just get the
status quo. The collective protects the norm.
If you want a breakthrough, you need an individual
visionary. That's a very seductive narrative.
We all love the story of the visionary genius.
But let me ask you, what happens to a vision
if no one understands it? The definition of leadership
roles in our text is very specific about this.
It says roles are those that facilitate execution
of an organization strategy through building
alignment and winning mindshare. Winning mindshare.
Exactly. The leader wins it. But winning mindshare
implies a relationship. It implies there are
minds to be won. You can have the most brilliant
visionary in the world, a real Steve Jobs type.
But if you drop him into a rigid, bureaucratic,
fossilized system that stifles communication,
what happens? He screams into the void. Baldwin
and Ford would warn us here. The capacity of
the individual is irrelevant if the interpersonal
linkages are broken. If the system doesn't have
the channels for that vision to travel, the vision
dies inside the leader's head. So I argue, don't
spend the million dollars teaching the leader
how to dream better. Spend the million dollars
fixing the communication channels so the dream
can actually be heard. I struggle with that because
it assumes the system is static. It assumes the
swamp stays a swamp forever unless a system mechanic
comes in to fix it. But a truly developed leader,
one with high self -efficacy, one who understands
their role perception, changes the linkages.
They bust the bureaucracy. They fire the people
who block communication. That is why we pay them
the big bucks. If we wait for the system to fix
itself, we'll be waiting forever. We need the
catalyst. The individual is the catalyst. Or
more likely, they burn out and become part of
that 85 % failure statistic. The research shows
that when you drop a change agent into a system
that isn't ready, the system has an immune response.
It attacks the agent. This is why retention rates
for these high potentials are often so worrying.
We set them up for failure by telling them they're
Superman, and then we hand them kryptonite. We're
running close to our time, and I feel like we're
standing on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon
here. So let me try to summarize the case for
the individual one last time. I acknowledge that
context matters. I'm not saying we should ignore
the environment or the supervisor, but ultimately
responsibility has to rest somewhere. It rests
on the person. The material highlights three
critical dimensions for succession, skills and
knowledge, role perception, and self -efficacy.
All three of these live inside the skin of the
leader. We must nurture the high achievement
drive of that specific human. If we dissolve
leadership into some vague collective process,
we lose accountability, we lose the driving force.
We need the Sandhurst model. Select the best,
train them well, and let them lead. And I must
push back one last time. Focusing solely on the
individual ignores the harsh reality of the data.
When 85 % of training fails to translate to behavior,
we have to stop blaming the learner and start
looking at the environment. True development
must focus on the collective level. We need to
look closer at the employee ship model. We need
to focus on supervisor support, organizational
alignment, and the social web. If you want behavior
to change, you have to ensure the soil is fertile
before you plant the seed. Otherwise, you're
just throwing money into a void. It seems we've
arrived at a necessary duality. The text reveals
that we probably can't choose just one. I think
that's right. You need the selection criteria.
You do need capable people. You can't lead with
incompetence, no matter how good the system is.
But you also need the systemic support that Baldwin
and Ford describe, or that talent is just suffocated.
Right. Perhaps the answer is that the individual
can only rise as high as the collective supports.
And the collective can only go as far as the
individual envisions. A fair place to leave it.
Indeed. We invite our listeners to look at their
own organizations. Are you waiting for a hero
to save you? Or are you building a system where
leadership can actually thrive? Until next time.