The Term "Leadership Development" is Broken

Here’s a short snapshot of leadership development and the workforce:

• Per Gallup, employee engagement is at 20% globally — the lowest since 2020.
• Per Hogan, there is zero overlap between the top 5 competencies leaders demonstrate and the top 5 that employees say they want.
• Many of us know from science and experience that there is a difference between knowing and doing.

And these things exist from first-hand experience, burnout, the toxic leader (or leader we think is toxic), or the reality of going to a workshop and it being a nice experience we had — not something that changed how I worked.

The state of things

How we use leadership development is broken. And I won’t pretend to have the answers to it all, but here’s the read:

We need leadership development, but the world around the leaders in our organizations is literally and actively working against them. A few things in the system around the leader do most of this work: who gets to call what shots (formally and informally), how the team pulls people into the role they end up playing regardless of what they bring, the everyday accumulation of stuff (processes/bureaucracy) that makes exercising leadership look like making someone’s job harder, and what behaviors our teams, organizations, and systems actually reward.

Treating the leader without diagnosing the system is malpractice.

Leadership development should be systems intervention. But it isn’t. In today’s culture, it often gets flattened down to leader development — and that’s more than a semantic problem.

In the academic space, my colleagues and I have argued these are two distinct things (Pontes & Weng; Day, 2000). But academics and industry don’t always translate one-to-one. There’s overlap, but the words don’t always mean the same thing. And I won’t pretend like trying to change people’s perception of what that phrase means is a light task.

Enter Leadership Architecture

Consider the possibility that we need to take things a step beyond leadership development.

Leadership Architecture is the deliberate design of the system around the leader: the decision rights, role pulls, processes, and reward signals that determine whether what gets developed actually gets done.

At Bricolas, we take the stance that leadership is not just about the leader. Leadership does not happen in a vacuum. And the best leadership and executive development programs will fail 100% of the time if the learning and experience aren’t actively being applied.

Today, most organizations have acknowledged the weakness of a training program filled with slides and someone teaching about leadership. Experiential activities are not new. Some organizations still struggle here. But most are moving on.

I (John) blatantly refuse to do training.

Instead, we consider leadership development as not just about skill building or making someone be someone else, but showing up for others the way that they need. It’s not to say we don’t do any skills development, we do. We talk about managing change, having coaching conversation, or giving feedback. But it’s not just what you do, it’s how you do it.

And we all know that feeling when we’ve been away, for a few hours or a few days. Our inbox has piled on, the team chat has blown up, and the calendar is so packed the idea of “trying something new” feels so impossible because I just need to get by. And, our teams, our managers, our environment, and our reward systems? Still reward or at minimum, expect certain behaviors. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t be where you are.

And so it is not a failure when a leader goes back into old behaviors. It is in fact simply a condition of their environment.

(One caveat: we’re in developmental territory here, not performance-management “fix it” territory.)

We invite you to consider: what are the interventions you have in place that address the environment around the individual?

Whether you’re an L&D leader reading this for your next development initiative, a coach or consultant working with leaders, or a leader who has gone to (or will be going to) a development experience — ask yourself: how are you going to account for the environmental factors?

What leaders can actually do

A few practical thoughts:

• Share with a few colleagues or your manager what your key takeaways are and ask them for some help in keeping you accountable
• Engage a coach who can help you anchor your learning from a program, webinar, or experience at work
• Consider a “hot” priority for your goals — get it specific, and let some stakeholders in that environment know
• Consider what environmental shifts might be needed. For example: do you need to tackle any working norms? Incorporate “how” the team worked in your post-mortem debriefs
• Consider reflecting or talking it out with someone at work about “how come it goes the way it goes” — then consider what might have to change in order for your change to actually stick

Of course, we can’t consider leadership development without simultaneously considering team development. Team coaching was a real upgrade beyond 1:1 training and off-sites/retreats in the field. At the same time, it’s a start, not the end.

For example, consider exploring system-based interventions to conduct an organizational analysis of environmental factors to be considered, as well as interventions that impact the broader team and organization.

And if this idea of leadership architecture interests you, I have more to say; more on the system-side coming, starting with role suction.