The Limits of Leadership Development

There are so many consultants and change agents today trying to transform organizations through leadership development initiatives. If only we can get a significant minority of leaders to realize a new level of developmental capacity, surely that will lead to an organization capable of transcending its current challenges… right?

Organizations resist change

Well, maybe. Though more often than not, when I talk with my colleagues doing leadership development work, they express a frustration that, while the work has a positive impact, especially on the individuals, true organizational transformations through leadership development are limited or non-existent. As a friend of mine said about going through leadership development programs early in his career: no amount of transformational experiences out on the ropes courses or in a retreat setting, however powerful, changed the fact that the team then went back into the same old context, with the same processes, power structures, and patterns at play — and the transformation efforts soon atrophied.

Even when leadership development programs succeed in catalyzing vertical development for participants, those leaders often face significant developmental “drag”. Their organizational context limits their new capacity or even pulls them backwards, so their own developmental shift is difficult to sustain individually and nearly impossible to spread organizationally. It’s a terribly frustrating situation, both for the individual who now sees this system more clearly, and for the leadership development professionals whose impact is limited by the broader systems and patterns at play in the organization.

Upgrade the organization, not just the leaders

So what is the committed leadership development professional to do? To really catalyze a whole-system transformation they’ll need to broaden from just developing leaders to developing the concrete organizational system itself. In other words, they’ll need to upgrade the way power and authority formally get defined, the way decisions get made, the way meetings happen, the way the organization is structured, and the processes used to define and execute day-to-day work. Thus they’ll effectively need to install a new organizational operating system, one which manifests new capacities organizationally — such as Holacracy® — even if a majority of the individual leaders within haven’t yet made the leap to the new mindset behind them.

From a leadership development perspective, here’s the ultimate irony of this approach: With a new “operating system” installed, one which itself embeds a developmental leap, the pressing need for individual leadership development is significantly decreased, yet its potential impact is far greater. Instead of well-developed leaders being constrained by the system and struggling to effect change despite it, now they have an organizational container that both embraces and reinforces their deepest capacities. With such a system in place, leadership development has a new and even more powerful role to play in helping the organization move forward.

And I think getting there will require a shift for many leadership development professionals as well. For me, it took facing and releasing my own attachments to other people’s development, so I could step back and focus on developing systems that “baked-in” advanced capacities while embracing people exactly where they already were — which ironically increased my capacity to facilitate development in others when appropriate. For a colleague of mine, it meant broadening his service offerings and associated skills beyond training and coaching to include full-scale organizational consulting. Whatever the challenge, for leadership development professionals who choose to make this leap, the transformation will start with themselves — and transformation is rarely an easy or comfortable process, even for those in the business of catalyzing it.