Welcome back to the deep dive. I want to start
today with a guarantee. I can pretty much guarantee
that every single person listening right now,
I don't care if you're on your commute, at the
gym, sitting at your desk. You have heard the
phrase we are tackling today. Oh, absolutely.
It's unavoidable. It lives in, you know, the
glossy HR brochures. It's in every other bio
on LinkedIn. It is the absolute bread and butter
of the entire corporate seminar world. It's sort
of the universal cure -all, right? Whatever the
problem is, this is the solution. Exactly. We
are talking about leadership development. And
I have to be honest with you and with everyone
listening, when I hear those two words, my brain.
It goes to a very specific and I'll admit slightly
cynical place. Let me guess. Windowless conference
rooms. Bad coffee. Windowless rooms, stale bagels,
that lukewarm coffee in a styrofoam cup. And,
you know, a group of adults who have real work
to do standing in a circle doing trust falls
or something. Or just staring at a PowerPoint
deck for eight hours. Yes. Just praying for 5
.0 p .m. to hit. It feels like a buzzword. It
feels a bit like, I don't know, leadership theater.
That's a harsh way to put it. Yeah. But I can't
say it's totally unfair. I mean. There is a massive,
multibillion -dollar industry built around exactly
what you just described. We sometimes call it
industrial tourism. Industrial tourism. I like
that. Yeah, people, you know, they visit the
concept of leadership for a day or two, but they
never actually live there. It often feels like
it's selling snake oil. Well, that's our mission
today. We've pulled together just a huge stack
of research, academic definitions, structural
models, all centered on the core mechanics of
this thing. And we're going to see if there's
anything real. underneath all that jargon? Is
it just about sending managers to a seminar to
check a box? Or are there actual mechanics involved?
How do you actually build a leader from the ground
up? And that is the fundamental question. Not
what is a leader, but how are they built? Because
if you look at the source material, the really
rigorous definitions, leadership development
isn't an event. It's not a seminar. It's not
a weekend retreat. No, it's defined strictly
as a process. A process to expand the capacity
of individuals to perform in leadership roles.
OK, I want to pause on that phrase because it
really stood out to me to expand the capacity.
It sounds almost biological, like we're talking
about lung capacity or muscle mass. That's a
very deliberate metaphor. Think about it physically.
If you want to run a marathon. You can't just
read a book about running. You have to literally,
physically expand your cardiovascular system's
ability to handle the stress. You have to put
in the mild. You have to tear muscle fibers so
they grow back stronger. The definition here
suggests that leadership is the same. It isn't
about learning a trick or a life hack. It's about
fundamentally stretching an individual's ability
to handle more complexity, more stress, more
ambiguity without snapping. And the definition
doesn't stop there. It tells us why we need this
expanded capacity. It says it's for facilitating
the execution of strategy, building alignment.
And this is the one I really want to get into,
winning mindshare. Winning mindshare. Yeah, it's
a fascinating term to see in an academic definition.
It sounds so aggressive. It sounds like something
from military doctrine or maybe a marketing campaign.
Why is that word winning in a definition of leadership?
Because leadership at its core is an active influence
in what is basically an attention economy. In
any organization, you have a thousand things
competing for every employee's attention. Their
email, Slack notifications. Their personal life,
the gossip going around the office, their own
anxieties about their mortgage. A leader has
to cut through all of that noise. You have to
literally win the mind share to focus that collective
mental energy on the actual strategy. If you
can't win their minds, you can't lead their actions.
You're just another voice shouting into the void.
OK, so this brings us to the first really big
question. If we're talking about winning minds
and executing strategy, who are we actually talking
about? Because when I say leader, you know, the
listener is probably picturing the CEO. The corner
office, yeah. The person with the reserve parking
spot, the one at the top of the pyramid. That's
the default setting for most of us, typically.
But the literature we're looking at today, it
makes this really critical binary distinction.
It splits it in two. You have the formal roles
and then you have the informal roles. Let's break
those down. Formal seems pretty obvious, right?
That's the hierarchy. That's the org chart. Formal
is the org chart. Exactly. It's the person who
has the official authority to hire, to fire,
to set the budget. They have the title on their
business card. They have the right to make decisions
and. Maybe more importantly, they carry the liability
for the results. Right. If the ship sinks. The
captain is the formal leader who is held responsible.
And this is where most traditional training focuses
all its energy. OK, but this informal role idea,
this is where it gets really interesting for
pretty much everyone listening who isn't the
CEO. This is where it gets interesting for everybody.
An informal leadership role is based purely on
influence. Not on authority. I mean, think about
that person on your team. We've all worked with
them who has zero power to tell you what to do.
No formal power at all. But when they speak up
in a meeting, everybody stops and listens. When
the team is demoralized after a setback, they're
the one who cracks a joke or refocuses the group
on the next step. The person you go to for advice.
not for permission. Precisely. Or think about
a colleague in a completely different department.
You need them to prioritize your project, but
you can't order them to do it. You have to persuade.
You have to build a relationship. You have to
negotiate. That's a leadership role. That is
absolutely a leadership role. You are leading
without a badge. You're influencing without authority.
So that's really the hook for this whole deep
dive then. If leadership development is supposed
to cover these informal roles, then we're not
just talking about the C -suite. We are, I mean,
we're potentially... talking about everyone in
the building. It completely democratizes the
concept. It means you don't have to wait for
the promotion to start developing this capacity.
The idea is to develop the capacity to be effective
right where you are right now. If you are influencing
the direction or the engagement of a group, even
if it's just the group deciding where to go for
lunch, you are a target for leadership development.
Okay, so we've established the ideal here. Leadership
development is about expanding capacity. It's
about influence, both formal and informal. And
it's for everyone. It sounds fantastic. But now
I have to be the bearer of bad news. We have
to look at the reality because the reality that's
described in our source material is, well, frankly,
it's depressing. We are now entering the crisis
of effectiveness. We found a statistic in the
source material that, and I'm not exaggerating,
it genuinely stopped me in my tracks. It's from
a 2015 study published in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences. Now, for anyone
who doesn't know, PNAS is not some random blog.
No, this is serious peer -reviewed science. Yeah.
One of the heavy hitters in global research.
They don't publish fluff. The study estimated
that as little as 15 % of the learning from traditional
classroom -style training actually results in
any kind of sustained behavioral change. 15.
1 -5. 15%. That is, it's catastrophic. It is
a failing grade by any possible standard. I mean,
imagine if we accepted that kind of failure rate
in any other industry. Imagine a car manufacturer
saying, hey, great news, 15 % of our brakes will
probably work when you hit the pedal. Or a surgeon.
Look, there's a 15 % chance this heart bypass
actually bypasses the heart. The other 85 % of
the time, well, I'm just sort of moving stuff
around in there. It would be completely unacceptable.
Society would collapse. But in the corporate
world, companies are spending billions of dollars,
literally billions, on these programs every year.
They fly people to hotels. They pay for facilitators
for the food for the lost work time. And they
are basically lighting 85 % of that money on
fire. It just goes up in smoke. So we have to
ask the really obvious question. Why? Why is
the failure rate so ridiculously high? Is the
training just bad? Is the coffee that stale?
Sometimes, yeah, sure. But the source points
us toward a much deeper problem. It's something
highlighted by the management expert Henry Mintzberg.
Mintzberg is a legend in this field because he
just refuses to look at management through rose
-colored glasses. He's a realist. A total realist.
And he talks about this dilemma between knowing
what to do and doing what one knows. That sounds
like a bit of a riddle, knowing what to do versus
doing what one knows. Can you unpack that for
us? It's the classic knowing -doing gap. In a
classroom under fluorescent lights with a nice
workbook in front of you, it's very easy to know
what to do. You can teach someone the five steps
of effective conflict resolution. Step one, listen
actively. Step two, validate their feelings.
And the person can memorize that. They can pass
a multiple -choice test on it. They know what
to do. It's an intellectual exercise. But doing
what one knows happens in the real world. It
happens when you're in a high -pressure meeting,
you're sleep -deprived, and a colleague starts,
I don't know, screaming at you or questioning
your integrity in front of everyone. And all
that training just goes out the window. It evaporates.
Your cortisol spikes, your fight -or -flight
response kicks in, and that little step one.
Listen actively from the workbook is gone. You
just revert to your baseline. You yell back.
You get defensive. You shut down. It's the difference
between reading a book on how to swim and actually
jumping into the ocean during a storm. I can
sit in my armchair and read about the mechanics
of a freestyle stroke all day. I can tell you
the precise angle my elbow should be at. Right.
You know the theory. But if you throw me into
the North Atlantic and I've never actually been
wet before, the second that freezing water hits
me and the panic sets in, I'm going to drown.
All that book knowledge is useless. That is the
perfect analogy. The classroom training is the
dry land. Leadership is the ocean. And Mintzberg's
point is that we spend way too much time on dry
land and then we're shocked when people can't
swim in a hurricane. The neurological pathways
for recalling information and acting under stress
are just different parts of the brain. You can't
simulate the emotional weight of leadership in
a workbook. OK, so if the classroom model is
fundamentally broken, how do we fix it? The source
material points to a framework from Baldwin and
Ford, and this goes all the way back to 1988.
They argue that the transfer of training, you
know, making it stick, isn't random. It depends
on three very specific variables. Right. Baldwin
and Ford. This was a landmark paper. They really
broke the system down. They said if you want
that 15 % number to go up, you have to pull on
three different levers. Variable one is individual
learner characteristics. Who are we even training
in the first place? Exactly. Are they smart?
Are they motivated to be there? Are they open
to new ideas? We're going to come back to that
one in a big way because that opens up the whole
nature versus nurture can of worms. It certainly
does. Variable two is the quality of the program.
Is the training actually any good? Is the content
relevant? Is the instructor engaging? That's
the obvious one. Companies spend all their time
and money here, you know, tweaking the slides,
hiring a more charismatic speaker. But it's variable
three that really caught my eye. This feels like
the silent killer, the assassin in the shadows
of these development programs. Variable three,
support for behavioral change from the supervisor.
Let's just sit with that for a second. Support
from the supervisor, not from the trainer. From
the boss back at the desk. This is where we get
the soil analogy. You can take a prize -winning
seed that's your high -potential employee. You
can give it the best possible nutrients in the
perfect greenhouse. That's your fancy training
program. But then you have to transplant that
seed back into the real world. And if the soil
in the garden, which is the supervisor's environment,
if that soil is toxic, the seed withers and dies.
Can you walk me through it? What does that toxic
soil look like in practice? Okay, so imagine
you go to a leadership course. You learn all
about empowerment. The trainer tells you that
you should trust your team more, let them make
more of their own decisions. You come back to
the office on Monday morning, you're all fired
up. You're ready to empower. You're ready to
empower. You go to your boss and say, hey, I
learned this great new technique for delegating
decision -making. I really want to try it out
with the team on the new project. And the boss
says... The boss, without even looking up from
their email, says, that sounds nice in theory,
but we have a hard deadline on Tuesday. Just
do it the way we've always done it. I need you
to micromanage this because we absolutely cannot
afford a mistake right now. Boom. The training
is dead on arrival. Instantly. Yeah. In that
one sentence, the employee learns the real lesson.
And the real lesson is that training I just went
to is completely irrelevant to my survival and
success in this company. they revert to the old
behaviors immediately because the environment
has overridden the education. And it's so tragic
because the company probably paid thousands of
dollars for the training and they're paying the
boss's salary. So they are actively paying someone
to sabotage their own investment. And often that
boss doesn't even realize they're doing it. It's
not always malice. Sometimes it's just, you know,
pressure and busyness. Yeah. But the outcome
is exactly the same. The 15 % statistic holds
true. So if you're listening to this and you're
a manager of any kind, This is a heavy realization.
You are the soil. You are the single biggest
variable that determines whether your company's
investment pays off or is just wasted. It implies
that a manager's job isn't just to sign the expense
report for their team to go to training. Their
real job is to create the space, the psychological
safety, and the active encouragement for them
to use the training when they get back. If you
weren't doing that, you might as well just burn
the money in the parking lot. OK, let's rewind
to Baldwin and Ford's Variable One, the individual
learner, because this raises a question that
I think makes a lot of people uncomfortable.
Can everyone be a leader? Oh, yes. If we fix
the training and we fix the supervisor support,
can we turn anyone into a great leader? Or are
some people just not built for it? This is the
age -old nature versus nurture debate. It's controversial.
But the source material we're looking at takes
a pretty pragmatic stance. It suggests that while
development is possible for a lot of people,
selection is a critical and often overlooked
part of the puzzle. You need the right raw material
to begin with. And the source brings up a very
specific, very intense example of this idea.
The Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Sandhurst,
yes. The British Army's Officer Training Academy.
It's legendary. So what's so special about Sandhurst?
What do they do differently? Well, they're famous
for the quality and the rigor of their training,
of course. But the source makes a really crucial
point. A huge part of their success is that they
go to incredible lengths to accept only those
candidates who already show the highest potential
to lead. They don't just take anyone off the
street who wants to be an officer. They filter
and they filter aggressively. So they're stacking
the deck from the start. They're essentially
picking the people who are already, say, 80 percent
of the way there. In a way, yes, though they
would probably argue they're picking people who
have the capacity to get there. It's like. You
can't teach someone to be seven feet tall to
play basketball. There are certainly underlying
traits that act as a foundation for everything
else you build on top. Okay, so what are those
traits? What are they looking for? If I want
to know if I have the right ingredients to be
a leader, what does the research say I should
be looking for in the mirror? The source lists
several key personality traits that are consistently
associated with successful development. Some
are pretty obvious. Motivation to learn. If you
think you already have all the answers, you're
basically unteachable. Your cup is already full.
Exactly. A high achievement drive. You have to
actually want to succeed to win. Openness to
experience. You have to be willing to try new
things and not just stick to what's comfortable.
But there's one specific psychological trait
that's mentioned that I find absolutely fascinating.
It sounds like something out of a science fiction
novel. Which one is that? Internal locus of control.
Internal locus of control. Okay, that sounds
very academic. Define that for us. What is a
locus of control? It's a foundational concept
in psychology. It goes back to a guy named Julian
Rotter in the 1950s. And it basically answers
one simple question. Who is in charge of your
life? Okay. People with a strong internal locus
of control believe that they are the primary
authors of their own success or failure. If they
feel a test, their first thought is, I didn't
study hard enough. If they get a promotion, they
think, I earned this through my hard work. The
cause of the outcome comes from inside. As opposed
to an external locus of control. Right. Someone
with an external locus believes that outside
forces dictate their life. Fate, luck, other
people. If they fail that same test, it's the
teacher hates me or the questions were unfair
or my roommate was playing loud music all night.
Oh, I know people like that. Everything just
happens to them. They're a passenger in their
own life, the victim in every story they tell.
Precisely. And the research is very clear that
for leadership development to be effective, you
need someone with an internal locus. And just
think about why that is. If you truly believe
that your success is just random luck or it's
all up to your boss's mood, why would you even
bother trying to learn new leadership skills?
Because it wouldn't make a difference. If the
outcome is rigged from the start, why practice?
Exactly. You need someone who fundamentally believes
my actions can change the outcome because leadership
is the act of trying to change the outcome. If
you don't believe you have your hand on the steering
wheel, you're not going to be able to drive the
car. That's a really powerful takeaway. If you
want to be a leader, you have to own your outcomes,
even the bad ones. In fact, especially the bad
ones. Absolutely. And the last key trait mentioned
is self -monitoring, which is basically the ability
to read the room. to sort of see yourself from
the outside, to have that little voice in your
head that says, oh, I'm boring these people.
I need to speed up or I'm coming across as too
aggressive here. I need to soften my tone. So
the source says that supervisors should be conducting
an individual assessment of these traits. This
means you can't just guess. You can't just send
everyone on the team to the same training. You
have to measure this stuff. You have to look
at the clay before you start sculpting. If the
clay is brittle, if they have a really high external
locus of control, you might need to work on that
fundamental mindset before you even try to teach
them about strategic planning. OK, so let's say
we've done it. We've got our raw material. We've
selected our high potential candidate with a
strong internal locus of control. We fixed the
soil by getting their supervisor on board. Now,
now we have to talk about the actual teaching.
If the classroom lecture fails 85 % of the time,
what's the alternative? What's the methodology
that actually makes this stuff stick? The source
outlines a few key criteria for success that
move us way, way beyond the one -off seminar
model. First, and this is a big one, is time.
So it can't be a weekend workshop in a hotel.
Absolutely not. The source suggests a set period,
something significantly longer. Six to 12 months
is often the benchmark for a serious program.
Why so long? What's the magic in that duration?
Because you're trying to change deep -seated
behaviors, not just transfer a piece of information.
You're rewiring a brain, and that takes time
and repetition. You can't change a habit you
had for 20 years in just two days. You need time
for people to try things, to fail, to get feedback,
and to try again. So what's happening during
those six or 12 months? It can't just be sitting
in a classroom once a month. No, and that brings
us to the second keyword, integration. It has
to include a whole diet of different experiences.
You mix in things like 360 -degree feedback,
one -on -one executive coaching, mentoring relationships,
reflective journaling, and yes, maybe some targeted
classroom work. But the engine that drives this
entire integrated process, the theoretical heart
of how adults actually learn, is a model called
Kolb's experiential learning. David A. Kolb.
Okay, the source really highlights this as a
key concept. I want to spend some real time here
because this feels like the secret sauce. It
feels like this explains how adults learn pretty
much anything, whether it's leadership or learning
to cook. It really is that fundamental. Kolb's
argument is that real learning isn't a single
event. It's a four -stage cycle. And the absolute
key is that you have to go through all four stages.
If you skip a stage, the learning just doesn't
stick. It evaporates. Okay, walk us through the
cycle. Let's create a character. Let's imagine
a manager. We'll call him Bob. And Bob is really
struggling to run effective team meetings. They
always go off the rails. So walk Bob through
Kolb's cycle. Step one. Step one is concrete
experience. This is just... doing the thing.
So Bob runs his weekly team meeting. And just
like always, it goes poorly. People are talking
over each other. A couple of people are just
on their phones. No real decisions are made.
Bob leaves the meeting feeling frustrated and
stressed out. That is the experience. OK. Bob
has done the thing. Now, normally in a busy corporate
culture, this is where we stop. Bob finishes
that awful meeting. He groans. He grabs a coffee.
And he immediately dives into the next fire that
needs putting out. And that is exactly why Bob
never gets any better at running meetings. Because
he skipped step two, observation and reflection.
Observation and reflection. After the meeting,
Bob has to stop. He has to consciously step back
and ask, okay, what just happened in there? Not
just did we get through the agenda points, but
how did the interaction go? I noticed that when
Sarah tried to speak, Tom interrupted her. How
did I handle that? I noticed that when I raised
my voice, the whole room went silent, but nobody
actually agreed with me. Why did that happen?
How did I feel? How did they look? This explains
why the source specifically mentioned journaling
as one of the tools. Journaling literally forces
you to do step two. Precisely. It forces your
brain to take the raw, messy data of the experience
and process it. It moves it from just a short
-term frustration into something you can analyze.
But reflection alone isn't enough. Now you have
to move to step three, forming abstract concepts.
That sounds pretty academic. Forming abstract
concepts. What does that mean in plain English
for our friend Bob? It means creating a theory.
It means connecting his specific concrete experience
to a general rule or principle. So when his reflection
realized, when I interrupted the team to try
and speed things up, they all just shut down.
Step three is where he forms the abstract concept.
The general rule is, if I want my team to be
engaged, I must create silence and space for
others to fill. He's creating a mental model.
So he's moved from the specific, I messed up
that one meeting. To a universal principle, I
now understand something about the mechanics
of team engagement. Exactly. He has a hypothesis,
which leads directly to the final step, step
four, testing in new situations, or as Kolb called
it, active experimentation. So he has to try
it out. Bob takes that new rule, his new theory
about creating silence, and he deliberately consciously
tries it in the next meeting to see what happens.
He treats his own behavior like a science experiment.
Okay, this time when I ask a question, I'm going
to count to 10 in my head before I say anything
else. Let's see what happens. And that, of course,
creates a new concrete experience. And the cycle
begins all over again. Experience, reflect, theorize,
test. Then you have a new experience, you reflect
on that, you refine your theory, and you test
it again. It's a loop. And your point is that
most corporate training and most corporate life
completely breaks this loop. Completely. Most
corporate training is all theory. Step 3. With
no real high stakes experience. Step 1. Or. In
our day -to -day work, it's all experience, step
one, with absolutely zero time for reflection,
step two. We're just running on a hamster wheel,
doing the same thing over and over and somehow
expecting a different result. That's a pretty
profound indictment of our busy culture. We are
literally too busy doing the work to learn how
to do the work better. We are. We consistently
mistake activity for progress. Now, there's another
psychologist mentioned in the source who is absolutely
crucial here, and he builds on this. Albert Bandura.
and his concept of self -efficacy. Yes. Bandura
is an absolute giant in this field. You can't
talk about behavioral change without talking
about him. We need to distinguish this from the
word confidence. We use the word confidence all
the time, very loosely. Oh, he's a confident
guy. How is self -efficacy different and more
precise? Confidence is a very general trait.
It's like, I'm a cool person or I'm generally
competent. Self -efficacy is incredibly specific.
Bandura's definition is... A person's belief
about their capabilities to produce effects in
a specific context. To produce effects. I love
that phrasing. It's so active. It's all about
agency. Notice it's not about whether you actually
have the skills. It is about whether you believe
you can use the skills you have to make something
happen. So let me see if I have this right. I
could be technically the most talented negotiator
in the world. I've read all the books. I know
all the tactics. But if I have low self -efficacy
for this one specific high -stakes negotiation,
if I don't truly believe I can handle this hostile
opponent, I'll probably fail. You might not even
try your best techniques. You'll likely crumble
the first sign of real resistance because your
brain is telling you, I can't influence this
situation. Bandura's core point is that the ultimate
goal of leadership development isn't just to
teach you how to do something. It's to build
your core belief that you can do it. That feels
like the difference between competence and capacity
that we talked about at the start. It is. And
good training builds self -efficacy by engineering
small wins. You don't throw a new leader into
the hardest negotiation on their first day. You
let them try a small one, succeed, and think,
hey, look at that. I produced an effect. That
little belief fuels the next, slightly harder
attempt. It's about spiraling upward with evidence
of your own effectiveness. So we've built the
individual leader, we've selected them for the
right traits, we've trained them using Kolb's
cycle, and we've built their self -efficacy.
But the source material makes this really interesting
pivot at this point. It introduces a subtle,
but, as it turns out, crucial distinction. The
difference between leader development and leadership
development. It sounds like, you know, semantic
wordplay, doesn't it? adding ship to the end,
but it actually represents a massive conceptual
shift in the entire field. Okay, break it down
for us. Leader development, singular, no ship,
is everything we've been talking about so far.
It's focused on developing the person, improving
Jane's skills, making John a better communicator.
That's what we call developing human capital.
Okay, that makes perfect sense. Leadership development,
on the other hand, is about the collective. It
focuses on the connections, the alignment, and
the systems between the people. It treats leadership
not as a trait that one person has, but as a
property of the group. It's about developing
social capital. So you could have a team full
of amazing individual leaders. Everyone has gone
through the best leader development programs.
But if they can't work together, if they all
hate each other, if they aren't aligned on the
goal, you have terrible leadership. Exactly.
I mean, look at professional sports. We see so
-called super teams. All the time rosters packed
with future Hall of Famers who can't win a championship
because there's no cohesion. They have incredibly
high human capital, but very low social capital.
Leadership development tries to build those interpersonal
linkages. It asks, how does this team make decisions?
Not just how does the boss make decisions? The
source brings up a really fascinating cultural
example of this collective approach. It talks
about a concept called employeeship. And it comes
from, of all places, Sweden. Yes, the Scandinavian
model. It's very different from the U .S. or
U .K. approach. Employeeship. It sounds a little
clunky in English, but the concept behind it
is beautiful. What does it actually mean? It's
based on this really simple but radical idea
that the qualities that make a good leader, things
like integrity, commitment, good communication,
taking responsibility for your work, are actually
the very same qualities that make a good employee.
So instead of drawing this hard hierarchical
line and saying, I am the leader, I am special
and different, and you are the employee, we are
here to follow. They basically say, we are all
in this together practicing employeeship. It's
about minimizing the gap. The source notes that
this strategy involves bringing the leader and
the team together to actively explore their similarities
rather than constantly focusing on their differences
and the hierarchy. And the source mentions this
works particularly well in a place like Sweden
because of what it calls small power distance.
Power distance is a cultural dimension identified
by the researcher Geert Haastad. In high power
distance cultures, think of many Asian or Latin
American countries, the boss is seen as a hierarchical
authority figure. You don't question them. They
are fundamentally different. But not in Sweden.
In low power distance cultures like Sweden or
Denmark, the boss is often seen as just a colleague
who happens to have a different set of responsibilities.
There's less formality, more collaboration. So
this employeeship model, it really treats the
entire team as a collective leadership resource.
Everyone is responsible for the leadership of
the group. It does. And if you think back to
our earlier discussion about informal leadership
roles, this fits perfectly. If everyone in the
culture is encouraged to practice employeeship,
then everyone is naturally stepping into those
informal leadership roles all the time. It seems
like a much more resilient way to run an organization.
You know, if the big boss gets hit by a bus,
the team doesn't just collapse into chaos because
the leadership capacity is distributed across
the whole group. Exactly. It's not a great man
theory of leadership where one genius is supposed
to save us all. It's a great team theory. Which
is actually a perfect segue to the final piece
of this puzzle. What happens when the leaders
inevitably leave? We have to talk about succession
planning. The long game. This is where organizations
really show if they're built to last. It's where
they live or die over the long term. So the source
defines it. simply as developing high potentials
to take over critical roles. But it's clearly
not just about picking a name and putting it
in a sealed envelope in a safe. There are logistics.
How do you actually groom a successor? The source
is very specific about this. It requires movement,
a lot of movement. The first thing it mentions
is extensive transfer between departments. So
you can't just stay in your comfortable little
silo your whole career. No. If you're going to
eventually run the whole company, you need to
have a deep, empathetic understanding of sales
and of operations and of finance and of R &D.
You need a holistic view. You need to know how
all the parts of the machine actually work and
fit together. And for multinational corporations,
the source says it almost always requires international
transfer. You have to go live and work in a completely
different culture. It builds adaptability. It
builds resilience. It forces you to rely on those
deep influence skills we talked about. If you
can successfully lead a team in Tokyo and then
lead another one in New York, you probably have
the kind of flexible capacity the organization
is looking for. But here's the part of the succession
section that really struck me. It got unexpectedly
poetic for an encyclopedia entry. I know exactly
the line you're talking about. The source material
says that succession planning isn't just about
filling a chair based on what we know and have
today. It says it must be based on what we aspire
to become. What we aspire to become. It's a beautiful
phrase, isn't it? It says succession is based
on a dream, a dream of the future organization.
This is such a profound insight. If you just
replace the current CEO with a carbon copy of
the current CEO, you're building in stagnation.
You're assuming that the future is going to look
exactly like the past. And we know for a fact
it won't. Markets change, technology changes,
society changes. So succession planning is actually
an act of organizational visioning. You have
to first ask, where do we want this company to
be in 10 years? And then you go find a leader
who is equipped to take us to that future, not
just someone who is good at managing our present
reality. And the source says that the people
who are involved in that planning, they have
to be able to articulate that future vision.
You need dreamers and visionaries in the room,
not just HR administrators with checklists. That's
it, exactly. And when they are looking at these
candidates, these potential dream fulfillers,
the source lists three critical dimensions that
they have to look for. Yes. Dimension one is
the obvious one, skills and knowledge. Can they
do the technical parts of the job? That's just
table stakes. You have to have that. Okay. Dimension
two. Role perception and the degree of acceptance
of the leading role. Acceptance of the leading
role. That's so interesting. It implies that
some people might have all the skills, but they
don't actually want the burden that comes with
it. Or they don't truly understand the burden.
They might want the title, the bigger paycheck,
the corporate jet. But do they truly accept the
weight of being the person who has to make the
impossible choice? The person who has to lay
people off. Do they accept that loneliness at
the top? And what's dimension three? We come
full circle right back to our friend Bandura.
Self -efficacy. Of course. It all connects. It
does. You need a successor who, deep down in
their bones, believes they can produce effects
at that level. Because when you step into a top
role, the imposter syndrome can be absolutely
crushing. The isolation is real. If you don't
have that core, unshakable self -efficacy, that
belief in your own agency, you will fold under
the pressure. So we have covered a huge amount
of ground here today. Let's try to recap this
whole journey for the listener. Let's do it.
We started by defining leadership development
not as a seminar, but as an almost biological
process of expanding capacity to execute strategy
and to win mindshare. Then we had to face the
brutal reality of the 15 % problem. The fact
that most classroom training fails because of
the knowing -doing gap. And maybe most importantly,
a lack of good soil, that supervisor support
back in the office. We looked at the individual
leader and the importance of selecting for certain
traits, like having an internal locus of control,
that deep -seated belief that you are the author
of your own story. And we broke down the methodology
that actually works, Kolb's experiential learning
cycle, the idea that you can't just have an experience.
You have to reflect on it, form a theory, and
then test that theory to close the learning loop.
We then shifted from the individual to the collective,
looking at this Swedish employeeship model, the
idea of blurring the lines between boss and worker
to build social capital and a more resilient
team. And finally, we looked at succession planning
not just as filling a role, but as a form of
dreaming about the future and finding people
with the skills, the acceptance and the self
-efficacy to lead the organization into what
it aspires to be. It's a comprehensive system.
It's not just one of these things. It's all done
working together. So what does this all mean
for you, the listener? I mean, maybe you weren't
the CEO. Maybe you're not even a manager yet.
The so what here, I think, is that leadership,
as we've defined it today, winning mindshare.
building alignment, exercising informal influence,
all of that is accessible to you right now, wherever
you are. It's about your connections and your
belief. Bandura's self -efficacy applies to you
today. Do you believe you can produce effects
in your environment? If the answer is yes, you
are already on the path. And I want to leave
you with one final thought, something to mull
over that connects that idea of the internal
locus of control with the employeeship concept.
Go for it. We know that 85 % of training fails
because supervisors don't create the right soil
to support it. But if leadership is really about
informal influence, can you be the soil for your
peers? That is a fascinating question. Think
about it. If your colleague goes to a training
course and comes back all excited with a new
idea and your boss just ignores them, can you
be the one who goes over and asks, hey, what
did you learn? That sounds interesting. How could
we use that here? Can you be the support system
that helps make their training stick? You can
be the supervisor's support, even if you aren't
the supervisor. Exactly. You can lead from the
side. You can create a microculture of employeeship
just by supporting the growth of the people right
next to you. And if you do that. Well I think
that might just be the best leadership development
program of all. I couldn't agree more. Thanks
for diving deep with us today. We'll see you
next time.