Why Leadership Development Programs Fail
A 2014 study by McKinsey analyzed why so many leadership-development programs ultimately fail. Their two leading critiques focused on the tendency for leadership programs to devalue the power of leadership context and the tendency to “decouple reflection from real work.” When the standard development experience (usually in an off-site, university-like setting) is divorced from the context and challenge of the work that one is leading, leaders--no matter how talented--often struggle to transfer insights to the frontline challenges.
The problem with most leadership programs, this and other studies have concluded, is that they are focused more on concepts than context, principles than practices, more on reading experts than reflecting on themselves, and, mostly, more on learning about leading than actually doing the work of bringing organizational change. They are exactly the kind of environment that religious leaders who have a tutored capacity for study and love for theological discussion and historical details thrive. They create an alphabet soup of acronyms and mnemonics for a long list of leadership principles that can be memorized, tested, and repeated back in papers and on exams.
Studies show, however, that those same concepts are quickly set aside once the leaders enter back into their context, which is always a complex “system of interacting elements.” Those principles get lost in the actual practice of leadership and the demands of competing stakeholders. In the heat of demands, deadlines, diminishing budgets, and organizational resistance, the stress of the moment results in a defaulting back to old habits and organizational behaviors, and that alone is the very failure of leadership that the training was supposed to overcome. Defaulting back to the emotion-laden, deeply unconscious, and stubborn status quo (what Ed Friedman called “the persistence of form”) is why so many leaders fail when they get the long-coveted promotion to group manager, project overseer, or senior pastor.
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Excerpted from Tempered Resilience: How Leaders are Formed in the Crucible of Change, by Tod Bolsinger)
