Transforming Leadership Development

It’s time to transform our approach to leadership development.  After all, most will admit that we continue to face a crisis of leadership in business and the world today.   Transforming leadership development will require us to acknowledge both the truths and lies of the most popular approaches to developing it.  The good news is that the leadership development profession has done a stellar job of defining leadership.  However, the ability to define leadership has created a false notion that if we can describe it, we can then reverse engineer leadership and create training programs that will teach people to emulate it.  However, if we are brutally honest, we have to acknowledge that this approach has not met its promise.  Transforming our approach will require both organizations and leadership development professions to admit our current system is not working.

Turning the Corner, Requires Us to Be Honest How Leadership Arises in the Human Being

I am not the only one in my profession calling for this transformation.  And as pioneers, we must thank the work of thought leaders like Robert Kegan, Bill Drath, Ken Wilbur and Bob Anderson because they are revealing the truths about adult development. From such research, we are coming to recognize that leadership competencies are not something we can train into the human being. Instead, we are beginning to realize these competencies automatically ‘boot up’ in the human being as a result of something else. When we fail to understand the inherent nature of leadership in the human being and try to get people to learn it through training and by receiving assessments – we may actually be delaying an executives growth, not fostering it. This is not the fault of the current system or the professionals that still deploy it.  After all, the old way of training resonates analytically and we have assumed the validity of this approach for years.  As always, it takes the work of trailblazers to transform a profession so that it does a better job of meeting its promise.

I am not saying there is no value in training or assessments. Both modalities can be an element that supports a robust program that fosters the growth of leadership in an executive. The key to improving the impact of leadership development program requires we engage approaches that work with, not against, the human operating system to support the birth of leadership in the human being.  The truth is that leadership arises in an individual as a more profound awareness expands.  When this happens, these individuals recognize they are far more than their personality and achievements.  They come in contact with the source of their experience and begin to trust it.  When this happens, their operating system begins to upgrade and with a new operating systems comes new applications, such as the expression of leadership competencies.

Moving Beyond The Concept of Leadership to Being a Leader

The truth of the matter is we can become overly enamored with being practical. Of course, business demands we enhance value by growing profit, expanding market share, being mindful of the bottom line, enhancing the customer experience, etc. However, these, again, are outcomes of being creative in our approach with those we lead. And, in a nutshell, leadership is the driver of this creativity. Being creative requires us to expand our vision for what is possible and to examine our approach to achieving it continuously.  And while the creative process will yield practical outcomes, if orient only towards practicality, you will rarely be innovative

The question now becomes, how do we awaken leadership in those that are in charge of building an atmosphere that fosters innovation? To do so requires that the leader innovate their approach and perspective to inspire creativity in others. To start on this path to expand one’s impact, one must understand what is driving them and who they are at a deeper level. As adult development research is showing, the expansion of self-awareness is the superior way to launching leadership competencies.

The Truth is Leadership is Not Developed, It is Inherent and Can Be Awakened

The expansion of self-awareness has proven its mettle time and again for my clients. For example, many of the clients I work with are extremely intelligent. They have had very successful careers demonstrating their business acumen and technical expertise. Typically at the start of coaching, they express some frustration that others can’t keep up with them. And they are looking for tactical approaches that they can deploy that will help them influence others to catch up with them. Because of this, they are a bit resistant to engaging in the self-reflection required to expand their awareness.

However, in every case, when a client earnestly engages a self-awareness expanding process – they enhance their ability to influence – although not in the way they expected. While tactical coaching can be valuable, the most significant shifts come when the executive realizes their very shaping of reality is at the heart of generating misalignment with others.

For example, one of my clients had an ah-ha moment, when he realized his very approach to interactions was creating defensiveness in others. He began to see it was he that was not listening, not the other way around. When he saw this, the light bulb went off, and he began to be more genuinely interested in not only what others were saying but sought to understand why they had a particular perspective. Almost overnight, the quality of his interactions shifted. He found his conversations more collaborative and fruitful. A couple of months later, he reported that he felt greater ease in his communications and discovered his influence growing with others. He said, ‘before this, I felt I was chasing after it, and now I feel the game is coming to me.’

Indeed, this new understanding was supported by upgrading specific tactics. That said, the real shift in this executive’s orientation to conversations came by an expansion of self-awareness that came from taking time to examine their approach, not judge others for theirs. The willingness to change when they see their liabilities is one of the reasons I most enjoy working with highly intelligent people. Once they see that most of the problems they face come from their orientation to said issues, they naturally shift their behaviors to an approach that is more effective. When someone attends training or receives an assessment that tells them they have to do something different, without this growth in awareness, it can be like throwing seeds on hard soil and little changes. But when the individual recognizes they are at the center of what happens to them and their very orientation has everything to do with the results that occur around them – they change.  In a sense, leadership is waiting in every human being to awaken.  This awakening seems to be catalyzed when the human being begins to earnestly inquire into their nature.

Summary

In summary, leadership is not a concept we can learn. The growth in leadership requires one to begin to explore the deeper recesses of their selves. Self-awareness and not more knowledge is the catalyst greater self-knowledge. And when one begins to get to know themselves beyond their disposition and achievements, they begin to recognize they are far more and that creativity is not something they have to learn. More powerfully said, it is already inherent and not something they have to learn. It merely takes discovering the tributaries that lead to their source of creativity and ultimately to their very being. We are, after all, human beings – not human doings.

For more information on my system of leadership development, please follow this link to download my white paper ‘The Authentic Courageous Leadership System.“