I recently had and email exchange with a colleague of mine about the role of leaders as both students and teachers in in-company leadership development initiatives. Our debate was wether is was better to develop a pool of leadership talent using external expertise or have the intervention led by organisational leaders. It was such an interesting thought that it led me to ‘pencil’ my own views.
I think the starting point is not whether the development intervention should be led by leaders or externals, but rather what is the intervenion supposed to be achieving. Te first is a debate about the methodology or vehicle and there may be all sorts of ways of delivering high performance leadership. The second is about measurement, evaluation, end results and questioning the strategic intent of the eventual programme. Assuming we can pin down and hook the eventual impact of any initiative into the strategic requirements of the business, then the methodology debate is slightly easier to answer.
I say slightly easier because there will be a variety of ways of deploying and implementing leadership development in organisations, each with their own valid benefits and short comings. I really like the idea of having leadership development being led by the company’s leaders, though I recognise that this approach raises some challenges of its own (I’ll come to them in a minute), but one of the arguments for having the leadership development intervention led by leaders internally rather than by external consultants and providers (don’t mean to do myself out of work here!) is that being put into the ’spotlight’ of having to develop others in the values, practices and behaviours leaders require to demonstrate in order to fully execute the strategy is actually VERY developmental of itself.
Of course there are some caviats: Do these leaders, charged with the development of the future leaders in an organisation themselves role model what is being described? Do they have the skills and acumen to be able to effectively develop those that follow? Do they have credibility in their own positions as well as in a development scenario? etc etc.
But I don’t think these challenges are insurmountable. We have all read plenty of research that provides evidence of the need for leaders irrespective of their professional standing and quality, to learn and renew themselves. If they are not continually learning they are standing still. So leaders have to be students, if they have to be anything. In the last couple of weeks I have been working with very senior executives in a global company getting them to tangibly think about what they do and could do to develop further the talent in their organisation. They found it extremely difficult but, I was told, extremely rewarding. They were students because they were learning about new ways to think about developing others and their role in making it happen. They enjoyed it because they realised they could be more creative than they had first thought and were able to envision their roles in directly engaging, coaching and creating interesting workplace assignments for their people.
Now here is my point. Initially I would not expect busy senior business leaders to be fully conversant with the ‘magic and mystery’ of leadership development, or indeed to have technical knowledge of design, development or delivery, but if I can learn how to do it, they certainly can. The role of leader as coach, developer and ‘teacher’ I think is an ever more important one, as employees look to their leaders for more than direction and guidance, but to reasons for staying.
There are enormous benefits in utilising internal resources, and in this case, internal leaders as the developers of a pipeline of future leaders in a company. The role of the external consultant/coach is one to provide some framework, advice and guidance on assessment, design and delivery; knowing the technical benefits and pitfalls of a variety of potential solutions. I think where an external consultant works in this way, as a true partner to the organisation on an intervention like this, the end result is stronger and longer lasting. If any further argumentative proof were required, Britannia Building Society is a great case in point. They developed qualified internal coaches from their senior leadership group to develop coaching internally to develop leaders.
I believe this approach is the way to go in the future. The very process is very developmental of leaders and having to develop others is a great way to build organisational glue for the ethos, values, practices and behaviours that future leaders need in order to execute their business strategies.
