How well does your leadership development deliver results?

Leadership engagement at every level is an undeniable requirement for successful change. Unfortunately, many executives think a seminar or other training program meets this need. No surprise that such palliatives have little impact. This is especially true when previous training was simply to be endured and change initiatives have failed.

Consequently, leading up to planned and often public change, leaders become part of the problem as they feel disengaged and powerless. The result is that they are too often unable and unwilling to manage rising uncertainty and declining morale. The question is:

How can you reengage managers and develop their leadership competence?

This blog looks at how you can develop both measurable short-term and longer term results based on:

• Getting the leadership team on the same page and then,
• Solving difficult problems while developing leaders’ skills

Why make sure Your Leaders are “On the Same Page?”

Experience shows that any change process is seriously flawed if leaders and other stakeholders are not aligned. “Getting People on the Same Page” is crucial before finalizing a change’s scope, design, and implementation. Our latest research underscores how to manage change successfully (Focusing Change to Win by Nick Anderson & Kelly Nwosu, 2012).

By surveying 1.072 leaders from 19 industry sectors and analyzing their 6,000 comments, we concluded that successful change needs a Change Expectations Framework, a framework that is accepted and consistently communicated at every organizational level to ensure that every stakeholder understands what they will:

• Stop Doing         
• Start Doing
• Continue Doing

Assuming leaders are always managing change with limited resources, they have to manage the tension between these three elements of Stop, Start, and Continue. This underscores the need for leadership consensus on why and what are we changing. For many survey contributors, leader inconsistency fuels people’s natural resistance. The ever-increasing rate of change demands that leaders give clear and compelling reasons for employees to overcome their feelings of “here we go again.” Unfortunately, too many of them either ignore, or are unaware that change will be stressful for their peers and employees.

Getting people on the same page relies on aligning individual and group expectations that develop more specific, objective, and measurable ways of working to implement change. It stimulates people to assess performance expectations of others, and to ensure they are aligned, reciprocated, and strategically focused. The process drives performance discussions between groups and/or individuals about their specific expectations and assumptions in relation to a specific change initiative.

Aligning leaders and their people is about helping individuals understand:

• What is expected of them

• What they can expect from others

• How well they are strategically aligned with initiatives, purpose and vision

• How their performance is measured and compensated

• What they can stop doing

• What they need to focus on

• What they should start doing

• What information and resources can be used to achieve their goals

• How they are going to be supported and coached

There’s no “Leadership Development Methodology” that will achieve such clarity. The focus has to be on integrating leader’s competency development with the demands of a specific change.

We should start by giving leaders credit for the concepts, processes, and skills they have already learned. Adding methodologies (no matter how good they are) risks creating indifference. We know indifference does not change behaviors! Conversely, building commitment relies on giving your people credit for what they already know, while at the same time changing behaviors that do not work.

This will result in:

• Mutually agreeing to clear change-specific performance criteria against which individuals and groups will be measured

• Removing expectations that are non-value added and not strategically aligned

• Identifying significant issues for senior management to address in order to advance change with speed, intensity, and momentum, above all

• Reengaging leaders who are than more confident in their role as change leaders

How do we make better use of this knowledge you already have?

Too often, leadership training adds new and unnecessarily different language to already cloudy corporate cultures and does not address what change demands -- sustained momentum and agility to solve critical and complex problems. This is where “Action Learning” can play a crucial role in successful and sustainable change. It is a powerful tool for developing leaders, building teams and improving performance. Such programs have helped create new products and services, saved billions of dollars, improved service quality and positively changed organization cultures (Marquardt, Leonard, Freedman & Hill 2009; Boshyk & Dilworth, 2010).

Since Reg Revans developed Action Learning back in the 1940s, there have been multiple variants but all share:

• Real people solving real problems in real time -- while learning

• Solving difficult challenges and developing leaders and organizations at minimal cost

Action Learning Teams help sustain a clearer focus on assessing how to lead in transition and learning to focus on those tactics which have the greatest potential. The goals of such a process are:

1. To make progress on solving some problem or opportunity in the real world
2. To give managers sufficient scope to learn for themselves with colleagues, how best to approach ill-structured challenges to which nobody can, at the outset, suggest any satisfactory response
3. To encourage teachers and others in management development to perceive their missions afresh; they should no longer try to teach managers anything about how to manage--their goal, along with senior managers, is to create the conditions in which all managers learn with and from each other in the pursuit of successful change

How do we get real value out of leadership development?

• Focus on alignment first
• Respect the knowledge and experience of your leadership team and help them use it to solve the immediate problems inherent in any significant change project
• Use Action Learning to advance change and competence simultaneously