{
perspectives
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LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
DEVELOP YOUR
LEADERS,
TRANSFORM
YOUR
ABOUT CORPORATE LEARNING
Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning partners with clients to create world-class leadership development solutions for managers at all levels. Our team leverages the management insight, thought leadership, and expertise of Harvard Business School faculty and authors from Harvard Business Review to create tailored leadership development solutions. With more than 20 years of practical experience, our innovative, technology-enabled solutions drive meaningful and lasting business results. Corporate Learning is a market group within Harvard Business Publishing. ABOUT HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING Harvard Business Publishing was founded in 1994 as a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University. Its mission is to improve the practice of management and its impact in a changing world. The company achieves its mission through its relationships with customers in three market groups: Higher Education, Corporate Learning, and Harvard Business Review Group. Through these platforms, Harvard Business Publishing is able to influence real-world change by maximizing the reach and impact of its essential offering—ideas.
H A R VA R D B U S I N E S S P U B L I S H I N G { 1 }
DEVELOP YOUR LEADERS,
TRANSFORM YOUR ORGANIZATION
Traditional approaches to leader development aren’t delivering on their
promise. They’re too detached from business operations and strategy,
and focus on knowledge and skills to the neglect of values and mindsets.
Here are three ways companies can better prepare their leaders to
sustainably advance their competitive positions.
BY SHERRY HEFFNER, SEAN KENNEDY, JOSH BRAND, AND PETER WALSH
TheconvenTionalapproach to leader development offers a variety of
pro-grams and developmental events, but they’re often delivered in isolation. Individual managers may improve their skills, but the impact on business results is often minimal. We frequently see the following imbalances:
o Companies spend money on manager training but struggle to create a
culture of performance.
o Organizations invest heavily in programs for high potentials yet still hire
outside talent for most leadership positions.
o Companies build detailed leadership competency models, but new
strategic initiatives stall.
o Most learning happens informally on the job, yet the leadership
development investment is still focused on big events and the classroom.
o Leadership development budgets are under increasing scrutiny,
even as strategies place greater demand on building capability.
Adding to these pressures, corporations worldwide are faced with a widen-ing gap in their global leadership pipeline. Organizational structures have flattened, eliminating positions that used to serve as key developmental
“IF THE RATE OF LEARNING IS NOT GREATER THAN THE RATE OF CHANGE, YOU’LL FAIL.”
DAVID A. GARVIN, C. ROLAND CHRISTENSEN PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL
steps. Globalization and growth in emerging markets pose new challenges for leaders. And eco-nomic uncertainty continues, rais-ing scrutiny on the investment of precious resources in leadership development.
To develop the leadership capabili-ties across their organizations that will drive business results, learning leaders and their partners in the C-suite must take a more holistic view of how they develop leaders and how learning opportunities (both formal and informal) inte-grate with the organization’s stra-tegic imperatives. Based on more than two decades of working with leading organizations to drive busi-ness results through leadership development, and in partnership with our faculty from Harvard Business School and authors from
Harvard Business Review, we have
identified three critical elements of an effective and sustainable leadership development strategy. And while each element is neces-sary, only an integrated approach that brings the three together will
produce a leadership culture that can drive an organization to win in its market.
Requirements for
Integrated Leadership
Development
Beyond Skills Training
HELP LEADERS MASTER CRITICAL MIND SHIFTS
Leaders frequently fail to live up to their personal and organizational expectations when taking on new roles—or living into existing ones—because they’ve honed their skills but haven’t learned to think in new ways. It’s a challenge for new and tenured managers alike, according to research by Harvard Business School professor Linda A. Hill. She’s found that, in the absence of guidance, they continue to focus on their individual ability to get things done—to accomplish tasks—rather than their broader role in making the team and orga-nization more effective. The failure to make these profound identity shifts in mindset, conduct, and
behavior early on can stay with leaders for years, even decades, showing up in complaints about leaders who operate “below their level” or lack “strategic thinking.” Hill warns that her findings held not just for managers struggling to make the transition, but also managers who were once high- performers but were no longer growing.
Meanwhile, most leadership devel-opment programs still emphasize honing new skills and knowledge, without sufficient attention to reframing how a leader should think about her influence in the organization and what it means to be in a particular leadership role. Addressing this identity shift in leadership development efforts is critical not only for leaders to successfully make key career tran-sitions, but also for incumbent lead-ers to live into their roles more fully. A major financial company saw the benefits of this approach when it revamped its frontline manage-ment program to accelerate its
CRITICAL ELEMENTS FOR EFFECTIVE AND
SUSTAINABLE LEADER DEVELOPMENT
Organizations can address the imbalances found inmost leadership development programs by going beyond traditional methods to adopt and integrate three critical elements.
BEYOND SKILLS TRAINING
Address self-awareness and the mindset required to succeed at particular leadership levels.
BEYOND INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT PLANS
Build pivotal capability to drive key imperatives required for success.
BEYOND FORMAL TRAINING
Embed learning with everyday work realities.
H A R VA R D B U S I N E S S P U B L I S H I N G { 3 } leadership pipeline. The new
cur-riculum provided a framework for managers to understand the crucial transition toward work-ing through others and addressed common misconceptions and pit-falls head-on. This message was reinforced by senior leaders, who shared stories with participants of their own development journeys. Key insights were translated into action plans and implemented with support from the participants’ managers. Framing the experience around mindset shifts brought the concepts home for managers and provided a context for meaningful application. The program, which had been considered unfocused and lacking in impact, came to be seen as a key strategic lever in the organization, which directly affected the firm’s ability to attract and retain top talent.
As Harvard Business School pro-fessor David A. Garvin describes, mastering the shift is a critical element that most leader develop-ment programs don’t emphasize
but should. He explains how leadership development should bring together a balance of “know-ing” (the acquisition of informa-tion), “doing” (the application and practice of new skills), and “being” (the values, identity, and purpose that animate leaders). The tendency is to treat this tril-ogy as independent variables that can be broken apart, which leads to missed opportunities to really impact the way a leader behaves. The process of integrating these activities isn’t easy or quick. And in both business and corporate education, the balance tends to be off, with a strong emphasis on “knowing” and “doing,” which leads to developing leaders who are not self-aware and not reach-ing their potential.
Beyond Individual Development Plans
BUILD PIVOTAL
CAPABILITIES THAT DRIVE THE BUSINESS
In a recent survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, only 33 percent of respondents said their
training and skill-development pro-grams focus on developing their companies’ most important capa-bility. One reason is that most orga-nizations assess leaders against skills-based competency models, but these models rarely differ much from one firm to another.
Harvard Business Review Press authors Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood emphasize the need for leaders to focus on the pivotal capa-bilities that differentiate a company from the competition. Even firms in the same industry can find pow-erful ways to tie key skills to their strategy and culture. For example, the leadership development pro-grams at Walmart should look quite different from those at Nordstrom. Yet simply recasting a competency model according to strategic pri-orities isn’t enough. The impact of skills developed in isolation on an organization’s strategic challenges will be minimal if learning profes-sionals don’t design programs to specifically address the challenges their firms currently face. Our
KNOWING-DOING-BEING
In their book Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads (Harvard Business Press, 2010), Harvard Business School professors Srikant Datar and David A. Garvin describe the need to re-create a balance between teaching “knowing, doing, and being” in MBA curricula. While distinct, these components of learning are mutually reinforcing. The authors’ contention is that finding ways to integrate these three elements is critical and that a particular emphasis needs to be placed on bringing the “being” into balance. Our experience shows this to be true in corporate leadership development programs as well.KNOWING Concepts Frameworks Information DOING Practice Application Execution BEING Identity Perspective Values
work with clients has shown the dramatic outcomes from strategic, issue-based programs that cascade through multiple leadership levels and engage leaders in a common strategic conversation and project work directly tied to the strategy. For example, AT&T launched an award-winning learning program aligned with its “One AT&T” stra-tegic initiative following numerous mergers. In six months, the pro-gram reached more than 100,000 frontline, mid-level and senior lead-ers worldwide. It promoted a com-mon culture and focused on pivotal capabilities such as innovation, col-laboration, and customer centricity.
Beyond Formal Training
INTEGRATE LEARNING INTO WORK PROCESSES AND ENVIRONMENT
In most organizations, formal leadership development and con-tinuous on-the-job learning expe-riences remain an ad hoc process insufficiently managed and poorly understood. More recently, com-panies have invested in social media tools with the ambition of individuals sharing, learning, and collaborating more virtually and just in time. While these tools
remain a positive development, the reality of on-the-job learning falls far short of its promise. Professor Kurt Fischer from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education helps shed some light on why this is hard to do. Learning isn’t a simple process whereby peo-ple move from incompetence to mastery in one easy step. Instead, learners go through multiple phases of action and reflection— where performance actually drops and then rises again. Complex skills simply cannot be learned without repeated application, and the level of performance is directly related to the level of support in the work environment.
An effective approach to on-the-job leadership development must guide leaders to master the right skills, provide multiple opportu-nities for application, and offer an increased level of contextual support through processes, envi-ronment, and leadership. In their
Harvard Business Review article, “Is
Yours a Learning Organization?” Harvard Business School profes-sors Amy Edmonson and David A. Garvin further define how firms can build learning mecha-nisms into everyday work.
Conclusion
Our approach moves beyond a view of work and learning as distinct activities to an integrated view of building leadership performance. Winning organizations:
oIntegrate learning across the spectrum from formal to informal to drive continuous improvement: Leadership development profes-sionals can’t look at traditional classroom-based training, learning from others, and learning by doing as discrete activities. To get the best individual and organizational results, they must design processes and activities that integrate all of these over time.
oBuild in ongoing opportunities for reflection and application of knowledge. Learning approaches should be extended to include multiple forms of collaboration and coaching. The ability to learn from others in a systematic way greatly increases an individual’s chances for success.
Leadership development is the criti-cal priority in many of today’s large, global organizations. Whether find-ing and developfind-ing talent to lead in emerging markets or replacing leaders who have transitioned into retirement, the question remains the same: What is the best, most effective way to develop a sufficient pipeline of high-quality leaders who can help an organization thrive? For those learning leaders serious about helping their companies win, a more strategic and integrated approach—one that broadens the traditional view of leadership devel-opment and training—is an abso-lute must. F
STRATEGIC LEADER DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS SHOULD BUILD “A COMMON AND WIDESPREAD UNDERSTANDING OF THE ORGANIZATION’S VISION AND CULTURE.”
HANDBOOK OF LEADERSHIP THEORY AND PRACTICE JAY CONGER, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS, 2010
SHERRY HEFFNER is senior director of product development for Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. She is responsible for advancing Harvard Business Publishing’s portfolio of corporate leadership development solutions and its impact for companies worldwide. Her background in technology-enabled learning and development spans fifteen years. She can be reached at [email protected]. SEAN KENNEDY is a senior strategic relationship manager. For more than a decade, Sean has partnered with Harvard Business Publishing’s corporate clients to build leadership capacity and capability by designing customized leadership development programs for them. Previously, Sean held sales management positions in the telecom and banking industries. Contact Sean at [email protected].
JOSH BRAND is director of network learning and is responsible for the delivery of Leadership Direct, Harvard Business Publishing’s cohort-based, virtual, in-company management education program for clients around the globe. Josh has more than 15 years of executive education and management consulting experience and has built management education programs for clients around the world. Email him at [email protected].
PETER WALSH is senior director of global marketing, responsible for all phases of global marketing, including client acquisition, client relationship management, solution marketing, and brand development. Prior to joining Harvard Business Publishing, Peter was the chief marketing officer of several leading technology and services companies. Contact him at [email protected].
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