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Hello, Enthusiast!
Here is your monthly dose of evidence-based insight and timely ideas to help you take your practice to the next level.
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Evidence-Based Insight
Topic: The Future of Leadership Development
Organizations spend over $350 billion annually on leadership development. Interestingly, much of this work is becoming out of date. The focus of the recent past—leadership training that revolves around skills or competencies—is no longer cutting edge.
In an attempt to stay abreast of the latest and greatest, a dozen or so researchers recently contributed to a special issue of Leadership Quarterly (a premier peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on leadership) that offers an evidence-based perspective on the future of leadership development.
I’ve read each of the studies, and below are the top three trends that practitioners should take note of.
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1. From Leader Development to Leadership Development
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A “leader” is an individual, while “leadership” is an influence process. The vast majority of leadership development is actually focusing on the characteristics (e.g., skills, competencies, attributes, styles) of individual leaders, which is more leader than leadership.
Why is this important? Organizations are “teams of teams”—everything individual leaders do is embedded within social structures. Thus, if we want to develop leaders, we need to focus on the relational and collective nature of influencing others.
Human capital practitioners need to be crystal clear on what exactly they are developing. Leader characteristics are important, but only when those characteristics map onto specific team processes.
As an example, developing leaders to be more agile—whether it be through ambiguity training, developing grit, etc.—is fine, but arguably less useful than developing leaders that understand how to cultivate and facilitate team agility.
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2. From Leadership Competencies to Leadership Identity
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The leadership development space is awash with competency models. This approach is attractive because it offers clarity to all parties involved. Interestingly, research is illustrating that competency models are less impactful than we’d like to admit.
For one, the need for certain competencies evolves based upon one’s position, career stage, or context. Offering a blanket set of competencies is inevitably overgeneralizing. Second, many of the approaches being used in competency training are simply helping leaders move from being good to slightly better. Thus, a new focus on leadership identity training is starting to surge.
Leadership identity is less about the specific characteristics of being an ideal leader, and more so about helping the individual get comfortable leveraging their strengths to step up and lead. This approach has been particularly promising in leadership development initiatives that target minorities.
At the core of this idea is that no matter how hard your work at leadership competencies, it won’t help if you don’t identify as being a leader. My take is that both approaches are important, with identity training having great potential for encouraging inclusivity as it relates to leadership within teams.
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3. Digitization of Leadership Development
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Like all things in business, there is a delicate balance between being efficient and cost conscious yet being as customized and impactful as possible. For decades, leadership and development initiatives tend to be the former—expensive, static, and top-down—and have been constructed with the average participant in mind.
Technology is making the opposite approach—cheap, customizable, and bottom-up—more possible. As an example, researchers and practitioners alike have started using the term “Personal Learning Cloud” as a way of conceptualizing the future, tech-infused approach to leadership development. The thought is that, eventually, individuals will have highly cultivated, interactive, experiential tools that allow them to customize a leadership development journey that makes sense for them.
In my opinion, there will always be a strong need for human intervention. However, the future winners in the leadership development space will likely have a rich understanding of how to employ and supplement their work using digital tools.
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We’ve seen relatively minor improvements in the leadership and development space over the last two or three decades. But thanks to research on teams, identity, and technology, we’re starting to see exciting new opportunities.
For those interested in exploring what’s next, I would encourage experimenting with leadership development initiatives that focus on team-related processes, leadership identification, and the potential for participants to “choose their own adventure” through technology-infused initiatives.
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The Self-Leadership Experiment:
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Next Steps
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Good luck out there!
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Scott Dust, Ph.D. is the Raymond E. Glos Associate Professor of Management at the Farmer School of Business, Miami University. He is also the Chief Research Officer at Cloverleaf, a technology platform that facilitates coaching insights for everyone.
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