Why Leadership Development Fails: The Assembly Line Fallacy

Summary

I’ve explained how a preoccupation with information, insights, and inspiration perpetuates the Leadership Development Delusion. In this essay, I introduce a second explanation for why leadership development fails to develop leaders—it relies on methods that worked in an industrial economy but lack relevance today.

Arms Full of Garbage

My family and I visited Disneyland several years ago. During one of our days in the park, we decided to stake out a spot to watch the fireworks that take place each night. We purchased takeout and enjoyed our picnic dinner together.

As the evening grew darker, hundreds of other park guests gathered around us. I realized at that point that I needed to find a garbage can to dispose of our dinner wrappers, bags, and cups. With so many people surrounding us, there may have been a receptacle ten feet from us, but I wouldn’t have been able to see it. I resigned myself to bear-hugging our garbage throughout the duration of the show.

As the music came up to signal the beginning of the show, I noticed a teenage Disney employee walking through the crowd in our direction. Since my arms were preoccupied, I bobbed back and forth like a buoy, trying to get his attention.

It worked. He knew a dad in distress when he saw one. As he walked toward me, I called out, “Can you point me to the nearest garbage can?” He didn’t say a word. Instead, he opened his arms like he was going to give me a hug and scooped up all of my garbage.

“Here, let me take that for you,” he said.

He turned and disappeared into the crowd. I was dumbfounded.

Disney employs over 200,000 people. How does a company that size train a teenager to willingly—even joyfully—carry away a stranger’s garbage? He could have ignored my plea for help, or directed me to the nearest garbage can. Instead, he scooped it up for me and freed me to enjoy the show with my family.

Concrete vs. Catalytic Competence

The Disney employee demonstrated a number of skills during our brief interaction:

1. Emotional intelligence: He could read the expression on my face as one of distress.

2. Situational awareness: He appreciated the fact that I was landlocked within the crowd.

3. Decision-making: In a matter of seconds, he had to determine a course of action.

4. Presence under pressure: Among the things vying for his attention, he prioritized my need.

5. Empathy in action: Rather than remain unaffected, he felt what I was feeling.

We typically refer to skills like this as “soft skills.” It’s a disservice to the value of these skills that we call them “soft.” As Seth Godin wrote, “We often call interpersonal and human skills ‘soft,’ which wrongly implies they’re optional or less important.” He wrote this in a Medium article entitled Let’s Stop Calling Them Soft Skills.

I agree. Let’s stop calling them “soft skills.” And let’s stop using “hard skills” while we’re at it.

Instead, I suggest we refer to Concrete Competence and Catalytic Competence. Concrete competencies describe a person’s ability to carry out discrete tasks. Catalytic competencies describe everything else. A catalyst facilitates change without being consumed in the process.

I suspect that the Disney employee, wherever he is now, has been recognized for these skills and is doing well. But it’s not just the hospitality industry that is searching for people with catalytic competence. Virtually every industry and company needs humans who know how to be, well, human.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Human Machines

The American economy a century ago was largely based on manufacturing. We built stuff.

In the quest for optimal efficiency and productivity, one impediment stood out from all the rest: humans. For all of our aptitudes and intelligence, we humans are a complex, unpredictable, forgetful, and fragile bunch. We’re prone to squabbles, laziness, self-interest, and stubbornness.

This explains our attraction to machines. They don’t argue, talk back, or show up late.

In order for the industrial complex to function, something had to be done about the inherent lack of predictability and consistency humans brought to the workplace. Efficiency, productivity, and consistency necessitated that humans behave more like machines.

Enter Frederick Winslow Taylor, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1856, who even as a child gained a reputation for his meticulous nature. He organized his books and clothing with extraordinary attention to detail, and grew distressed if anything was out of order.

Every step of the production process had to be timed and tested by a “Time Engineer” to determine the most efficient way to complete a series of tasks.

Taylor began his career as a laborer at Midvale Steel in Philadelphia, eventually rising to chief engineer. It was there that he started experimenting with what would become scientific management.

Taylor noticed that workers on the shop floor had varying levels of productivity, even when doing the same task. To prove there was a better way, he took a stopwatch and clipboard and timed every motion a worker made while performing simple tasks—such as moving iron bars, turning a lathe, or lifting parts.

One well-known example of his early work involved the task of cutting metal with a lathe. In order to increase consistency and efficiency, Taylor would:

• Observe the motions involved in placing the metal, setting the tool, and performing the cut.

• Time each motion with a stopwatch.

• Record variations and eliminate unnecessary movements.

• Determine the fastest, most efficient method.

• Train workers to follow that standardized sequence exactly.

Taylor would later describe how this allowed Midvale Steel to double or even triple output without exhausting workers—provided they followed the precise instructions derived from his measurements.

In his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor writes:

“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

Numerous companies borrowed from his principles to transform efficiency and production. But Taylor’s practices incurred a hefty cost—intended or not. His philosophy of management reinforced the notion that humans can and should behave more like machines.

Seminars as Assembly Lines

A host of factors converged toward the middle of the 20th century to revolutionize the American economy. An economy based on knowledge, innovation, and service replaced demands for standardization, efficiency, and manual labor from the industrial era. The new economy required adaptability, technology, and human creativity.

The industrial economy needed humans to behave more like machines. Companies now need humans to behave more like humans. Companies used to seek employees to fulfill the tasks listed on a job description. Increasingly, they want employees with catalytic competence.

Employers exchanged Taylor’s focus on technical skills and principles and began to focus on catalytic competencies. But while they updated their leadership development content, they failed to update the process by which they sought to cultivate these skills.

This fatal flaw resulted in programs, conferences, workshops, and seminars predicated on the faulty notion that leaders would develop catalytic competence through repeated exposure to information.

As an example, I was once asked to sit through a six-session seminar as an observer. Participants met weekly for an entire day. Each day included a series of modules that focused on topics like effective listening and communication, and how to build trust. Sessions blended slide presentations, small group discussion, and hands-on exercises designed to illustrate the principles contained in the seminar binder. At the close of the final session, participants shared their takeaways with the group and received a certificate of completion.

This approach to leadership development is so familiar, so ubiquitous, that we hardly question it. The fact that it shows little impact on the participants doesn’t seem to matter. They learned the principles. They did the activities and the homework. They must be better leaders, right?

Wrong.

It’s a leadership development assembly line. We even talk about training as something we go “through,” like cars passing through various stages of assembly. Proof of completion serves as evidence that we’ve completed the process and presumably developed a particular catalytic competence.

Leaders do not develop the skills required for today’s marketplace through the same means that they developed skills for the industrial economy a century ago. Frederick Winslow Taylor improved efficiency by teaching employees discrete steps they could replicate throughout the manufacturing process. This worked because the training process treated employees like they were a product on an assembly line. Instead of assembling vehicles, employees acquired skills in modules and received certifications for demonstrating competence. The industrial approach works with finite, measurable skills because they provide immediate feedback. A trainer can confirm an employee’s competence in a particular skill through observation—either they adhere to each step in the process or they don’t.

But how do you improve a leader’s ability to build trust, make good decisions, or improve their listening and communication skills?

You can’t time empathy with a stopwatch.

The reason leadership development continues to fail to develop leaders is that it retains the belief that leaders can develop concrete and catalytic skills through the same means. It swapped out the training content without updating the process. The belief that a leader can go through a seminar, attend a conference, or complete a course reflects our assembly line mentality.

Using my example above, the leaders traveled through the six-week seminar like vehicles along an assembly line. They learned about soft skills each week and had the opportunity to practice them with one another. Those with perfect attendance received their certificate of completion.

The problem, of course, is that the way we develop catalytic skills shares little in common with how we learn concrete skills.

Adapting our approach to developing leaders is not a matter of swapping out content. We have to change the process.

How to Actually Develop Catalytic Competence

So how did that teenage Disney employee develop his catalytic competence? And what can we learn and apply to the way we develop leaders in the new economy?

1. Use Mentoring, Not Modules

Pair every new employee with someone who already demonstrates the behaviors you most want to multiply. This isn’t classroom training. It’s apprenticeship in real work. Follow the See-Do-Coach model:

See: Have an employee observe model behavior as demonstrated by experienced colleagues in actual work situations.

Do: Have them practice the behavior in real situations with mentor support.

Coach: Provide specific, immediate feedback while the learning is fresh.

Reinforce behaviors through recognition and stories

When someone demonstrates the behaviors you want, celebrate them publicly—and turn recognized behaviors into stories that spread throughout the organization.

1. Make Leaders into Coaches

This study from Gallup highlights the need for bosses to function as coaches. It goes on to highlight the following qualities of exceptional coaches:

• Focus on individual and team engagement: Coaches provide employees what they need to succeed, leveraging the 12 elements of engagement to drive motivation and performance.

• Leverage individual talents and strengths: Coaches understand and deploy each employee’s unique strengths

• Set clear expectations and offer developmental feedback: Coaches establish clear goals and deliver feedback that enhances strengths and team effectiveness—a contrast to bosses who typically focus on correcting mistakes.

1. Turn Your Abstract Values into Specific Behaviors

Multiply the behaviors that matter most. Whatever your organization claims to value—innovation, collaboration, quality, integrity—define exactly what those look like in daily practice. This essential step translates abstract ideas into visible expressions.

Why This Approach Works

1. Clarity: Everyone knows exactly what “good” looks like.

2. Repetition: Behaviors become habit through on-the-job practice, not just concepts employees memorize for a test.

3. Social norming: New hires see the culture in action from day one.

4. Continuous development: Formal mentoring and informal peer guidance preserve high standards over time.

The Real Competitive Advantage

While your competitors send their people to leadership seminars, you create leaders through a fundamentally different process. You understand that catalytic competence can’t be downloaded—it has to be developed through relationships, practice, and continuous reinforcement in real situations.

The assembly line was a brilliant solution for industrial challenges. But humans aren’t products. We’re complex beings whose greatest capabilities emerge through authentically human development processes.

The Disney employee that collected my garbage would have been seen by Taylor as a clear demonstration of inefficiency. I saw his behavior as an act of human kindness.

The companies that prioritize human development won’t just develop better leaders—they’ll humanize their organizations. And in an increasingly automated world, being more human isn’t just an advantage.

It’s essential.

Flavor-of-the-Month Leadership Development

“The problem isn’t commitment—most leaders are serious about developing people. The problem is integration. They lack a unifying process they can own, one that connects learning to real work and real growth.”

Summary

Companies know they must develop their leaders to attract, engage, and retain talent. The business case is obvious: without strong leadership, performance, retention, and culture suffer.

Yet the way most organizations pursue leadership development is broken. They spend billions on workshops, certifications, and retreats that inspire temporarily but rarely change anything long term. Leaders themselves often grow jaded, even resentful, when the next “flavor of the month” (FOTM) program is rolled out.1

The leadership development industry thrives on this cycle. New frameworks, models, and tools arrive each year, promising transformation but usually delivering little more than new jargon. Over time, the accumulation of these disconnected efforts creates cynicism, fatigue, and wasted resources.

The alternative is a fundamentally different category of leadership development: Generative Leadership Development (GLD). GLD is not another framework to bolt onto the pile. It is a process—a system for discovering, co-creating, integrating, and sustaining leadership growth from within an organization. GLD offers the antidote to the FOTM cycle and establishes a path leaders can actually trust.

The Flavor-of-the-Month

The sheer volume of leadership content is part of the problem. Conferences, books, podcasts, and keynote speakers flood the market with competing philosophies and vocabularies. Leaders are constantly invited to adopt new frameworks, only to see them fade as another model captures executive attention.

The typical pattern looks like this:

1. A company adopts a leadership framework and experiences a short burst of clarity and enthusiasm.

2. After initial use, leaders hit a wall—the model has no further depth to offer.

3. Executives seek out the next framework, which is either layered onto the old one or used to replace it entirely.

Over time, leaders become fluent in multiple languages of leadership without ever mastering one. The result is a patchwork of frameworks, each carrying its own tools and jargon.

The leaders subjected to these cycles know they are simply being asked to play along until the next wave arrives. One younger leader put it bluntly:

“I dread when our CEO comes back from a retreat. I know he’ll introduce another leadership model that we’ll do for a while before it’s replaced by the next one.”

The problem isn’t commitment—most leaders are serious about developing people. The problem is integration. They lack a unifying process they can own, one that connects learning to real work and real growth.

The Three Flavors of the Leadership Development Delusion

Most FOTM programs fall into one of three categories:

1. One-Offs

Workshops, Motivational Speakers, and Leadership Event Days

Annual or quarterly “leadership days” and bootcamps deliver energy, inspiration, and sometimes useful skills. But the impact almost never lasts.

A Harvard Business Review analysis noted that only about 25% of senior managers believe training meaningfully affects business outcomes, citing systemic barriers that prevent application. Without reinforcement or integration, leaders quickly regress to the status quo.2

2. Products

Prepackaged Competency Models, Certifications, and Badges

This flavor prescribes lockstep pathways through a predetermined curriculum. Leaders march through modules, earn certificates, and check boxes.

The flaw is structural: these programs offer solutions without diagnosing organizational problems. They feel safe—popular, well-marketed, defensible—but they are decoupled from the leader’s actual challenges.

3. Grab Bag

Book Clubs, Manuals, and Languages

Groups of leaders commit to reading books or manuals, layering new frameworks on top of existing ones. Without a coherent process, this introduces competing leadership languages.

Leaders end up speaking different dialects of leadership, which breeds confusion, inconsistency, and jargon creep.

What unites these three flavors? They all assume that if leaders consume good information, transformation will follow. But this assumption is false. Information without integration creates insight, not change.

That is the essence of the Leadership Development Delusion—the belief that inspiration and intention will translate into transformation.

Push vs. Pull: The Fault Line

Most leadership development still operates as a push system. Organizations prescribe curricula, march leaders through content, and reward completion with certificates.

The result is compliance, not growth. Leaders endure content that feels detached from the real problems they are responsible for solving.

By contrast, a pull system removes obstacles and creates conditions where leaders draw development into their daily work. Learning is contextual, voluntary, and directly tied to problems leaders are motivated to solve. Growth becomes the path of least resistance.

Read through the following descriptions. Which sounds more like your company’s approach to developing leaders?

• Push Approach

  • Prescribes set curricula and linear pathways

  • Content delivered externally, often generic

  • Focus on completion, certificates, and badges

  • Episodic: workshops, retreats, or one-off events

  • Compliance-driven, leaders endure content

  • Short-term bursts of insight, little follow-through

• Pull Approach

  • Emerges from real challenges leaders face

  • Development is co-created and contextual

  • Focus on application, integration, and results

  • Continuous: embedded in daily work and culture

  • Owner-driven, leaders draw learning in voluntarily

  • Sustainable growth, adaptive to evolving needs

How’d you do? If you’re like most leaders, your experience up to this point in your career resembles the push descriptors.

Generative Leadership Development (GLD)

Breaking the push cycle requires a new category of leadership development—Generative Leadership Development (GLD).

GLD is not about content; it is about process. It shifts leadership development from consumption to creation, from prescription to participation, from episodic training to embedded practice.

GLD rests on four pillars:

• Discovery – Surface real challenges and opportunities through discovery interviews, small groups, and surveys. Instead of guessing what leaders need, the company asks.

• Co-Creation – Leaders collaborate in designing their own development journey. Rather than impose an off-the-shelf curriculum, the organization builds a program that grows out of lived challenges.

• Integration – The program weaves leadership growth into the company’s vision, values, and systems. Development is not an extracurricular activity; it becomes embedded in how the company operates.

• Sustainability – Because leaders co-create it, the program adapts and evolves. It is not discarded when the next trend emerges. It becomes the company’s own leadership system, designed to endure.

The generative process creates a leadership culture that leaders trust because they built it themselves. It replaces the churn of FOTM with a single framework that matures with the organization.

GLD: A Category All to Itself

Traditional leadership development can be critiqued, refined, and improved, but it cannot escape its structural flaws. It is locked into the push model, dependent on content delivery, and wedded to episodic, external solutions.

GLD, by contrast, functions more like an organizational philosophy—akin to lean manufacturing or agile methodology—than a program.

It is not something you buy; it is something you build and sustain.

This distinction forges a new category for leadership development:

• Traditional leadership development depends on external, prescriptive, episodic, FOTM-driven content.

• Generative Leadership Development includes and process that’s internal, generative, continuous, co-created, and embedded.

This category shift reframes the decision for executives. The question is no longer:

“Which vendor’s framework should we adopt this year?”

But instead:

“How do we build our own leadership system that lasts?”

Hello GLD. Goodbye FOTM.

The demand for a generative alternative is rising, and the reasons are clear. Cynicism is growing. Leaders have seen too many cycles of frameworks come and go, leaving them skeptical of anything billed as “the next big thing.” They are hungry for an approach that won’t fade once the novelty wears off. GLD answers that hunger by offering something leaders can build and sustain themselves.

Budgets are also under increasing scrutiny. Executives want measurable ROI, not just certificates and applause at retreats. They know the dollars spent on leadership development must produce observable change in performance, retention, and culture. GLD makes ROI visible because it ties development directly to business goals and builds systems leaders actually use.

Retention is another urgent driver. Employees don’t leave companies—they leave bad managers. Leadership quality is now a make-or-break factor for talent.3 By embedding leadership development into daily rhythms rather than outsourcing it to the next FOTM, GLD strengthens the manager-employee relationship and addresses one of the biggest levers of retention.

Culture, too, is on the line. Leadership shapes engagement, trust, and performance more than any single initiative. Without capable leaders, culture efforts collapse into slogans and posters. GLD ensures leadership growth is not an add-on but the operating system that makes cultural transformation real.4

Finally, adaptability has become critical. Companies need leadership systems that evolve as fast as their environment. Traditional leadership development is too slow, too rigid, and too dependent on external providers. GLD, by contrast, is generative: it adapts as the company adapts, ensuring leadership keeps pace with complexity.

Taken together, these factors show why leaders are ready for GLD. It speaks to the pain points they feel daily and offers a process they can trust to deliver sustainable growth.

The Future is Generative

The leadership development industry thrives on novelty. But leaders don’t need novelty—they need growth that endures.

GLD replaces the cycle of flavors with a framework that is both timeless and adaptive.

When organizations implement GLD, they discover that leadership development stops being something “done to” leaders. It becomes something leaders do for themselves, with their people, and for their company’s future.

It is not another box to check; it is the system that underpins how the company grows.

A Final Word

Recent trends in leadership development indicate the era of FOTM leadership is ending. The era of generative leadership has begun.

GLD isn’t just an improvement on existing leadership development. It is a different category entirely—one designed to create the kind of leaders companies actually need in a world where change is constant, trust is fragile, and culture is everything.

Subsequent articles expound on each element of the GLD approach and how to integrate it into your company.

1

ATD. (2023). State of the Industry Report. Association for Talent Development.

2

Beer, M., Finnström, M., & Schrader, D. (2016). Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review.

3

Gallup. (2015). State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders.

4

Gallup. (2020). State of the American Workplace.

Beyond the Leadership Development Delusion

My Evolution from Presentations to Products to True Partnerships

Summary

I've been working with leaders since 2006 to help them develop themselves and others. Looking back, I can identify three phases in my evolution, each built around a central offering to my clients:

• Phase 1: Presentations As "The Sage on the Stage," I delivered keynote presentations and facilitated workshops.

• Phase 2: Products I offered leadership tools and processes as products that comprise a shared leadership language.

• Phase 3: Partnership I form a trusted partnership with clients in which we co-create custom solutions to their unique challenges.

The majority of companies rely on the offerings I included in my first two phases of work—presentations and products. For reasons that we will explore throughout this series, very few companies develop bespoke leadership development approaches.

Phase 1: Presentations

A global apparel brand brought me in to speak to 500 of their top brand leaders. At the close of my keynote a woman approached the stage and raved about my presentation. She said it couldn't have been more helpful or timely.

"My team and I have been stuck for months," she said. "Your presentation is exactly what we need to get unstuck. I can't wait to share it with my team."

She went on to pay me high praise for my delivery and presentation style. I was grateful for her feedback and to hear she got so much out of my talk. But as she turned to leave something didn't feel right.

In the face of so much positive feedback, what could possibly be wrong?

I had just delivered a keynote presentation that informed and inspired the audience. I provided practical tips and techniques they could apply to their work. I did my job as a presenter and I did it well.

Still, something didn't sit well with me. As I traveled home, I kept replaying the interaction with the leader in my mind to try and figure out the source of my concern.

I began to imagine her making her way to the back of the auditorium. I pictured her looking at her phone and seeing the dozens of unanswered texts, emails, and messages that accumulated during my talk. She was probably inundated by demands from people vying for her attention.

You get the idea. This is how real life plays out for all of us.

My heart sank as this scenario unfolded in my mind. I realized that despite her best intentions and mine, the insights she gained from my talk are no match for the other professional and personal demands competing for her attention.

I realized that the nagging feeling I experienced after my talk was the realization that I was perpetuating a flawed and outdated model of leadership. I was contributing to the "Leadership Development Delusion" and its mythology. I expected that the inspiration audiences derived from my keynotes would somehow lead to longterm transformation.

I had fallen victim to the magical thinking that infects so many leadership development approaches.

There had to be a better way.

Phase 2: Products

A turning point came when I was sitting across from a Vice President of Product for a global retailer. I had been coaching her for about six months when she said, "Andrew, I'm really struggling with my team, and I don't know what to do," she said, "We don't communicate well and several of them don't get along with each other."

I understood her struggle. My masters program trained me how to assess people systems and dynamics. The problem was that I lacked the tools and frameworks I needed to address the issue in a corporate context.

I couldn't help her.

This realization set me in search of solutions that I could use to address these kinds of leadership challenges. In the months and years that followed I familiarized myself with a host of leadership tools and sought out relevant certifications. The companies I worked with experienced immediate improvements in leadership, culture, and productivity.

One of the first teams I worked with in this second phase of my career was experiencing interpersonal conflict that hampered their ability to perform. The CEO was thrilled when I was able to resolve the conflict and get the team back on track in less than six weeks. Another company I worked with early on experienced a fourfold increase in productivity as a direct result of our work together.

This phase of my work solved for some of the difficulties I experienced as a presenter. Instead of appearing as "The Sage on the Stage," I was able to work with companies for longer periods of time. I got to walk alongside them and help familiarize them with my products, tools, and processes.

But as this phase of my career unfolded, several concerns began to mount—not about the outcomes for my clients, but the means by which I was reaching them.

Challenges in business, especially those related to people, include layers of complexity. In most cases, a simple solution won't do. Yet that's what I found myself offering—simplistic solutions to complex problems. I found myself knowing the solution without fully understanding the problem. I had come to believe that since I have a hammer, everything must be a nail.

Offering products and solutions to companies solved the dilemma I faced as a presenter. I could now bring verifiable change to company leaders and their culture. Now I encountered another challenge: how to craft an approach that addresses the complex issues leaders face rather than view their problems through my solutions.

Phase 3: Partnership

Presentations and products—the first two phases of my work—fail companies for a host of reasons. One reason is that they encourage passivity on the part of the client. The consultant fulfills the role of the SME—the leadership subject matter expert. This typically involves workshops and small groups where the role of the client is to listen and learn. As a presenter, and then as a purveyor of products, my role was to share my expertise. The client's role was to absorb it. That's the agreement.

No small amount of magical thinking perpetuates this tacit agreement between client and consultant. It presupposes that my expertise will somehow transfer to clients like an undetectable contagion.

A turning point in my thinking took place when I kicked off a company-wide leadership process with a group of several dozen key leaders. Judging from the body language in the audience, this group seemed to have more detractors than usual. Many had their arms crossed, or avoided eye contact. One person had his back turned to me.

Rather than proceed with my kickoff keynote as planned, I changed directions. I asked them to break into pairs and answer a single question:

If you could wave a magic wand and improve one issue with the company leadership and culture, what would it be?

The dynamic in the audience shifted immediately. The room quickly filled with energetic discussions. After ten minutes I brought them back together and asked them to share their answers. Things like miscommunication, lack of trust, conflicts, inefficiencies, burnout and turnover surfaced from their discussions.

As the list of issues unfolded, I wrote them on the whiteboard up front. I noticed a change had taken place in the audience. Most were leaning forward in their seats. Not a single person's arms were crossed. Even the person with his back to me had turned to face forward and join the discussion.

What happened?

The great American novelist, John Steinbeck said that "If a story is not about the hearer they will not listen." In other words, the role of an author is to craft a story in such a way that the reader can see themself in it.

This explains the visible shift I observed in the audience. I made the process about them, not me. After all, they're the experts on themselves and their company. I'm the expert on my subject matter. Together we recast the implicit agreement between consultant and client as co-creators.

This experience proved invaluable in my evolution to the third phase of my career. From that point forward I began engagements by clarifying the needs of each client. Then we begin to build and refine a plan that we tailor to their unique challenges. The result is a custom program that our clients own and sustain.

I’ll share more details about this approach in future articles.

Where Does Your Company Stand?

My journey through these three phases taught me that most companies are still operating with outdated approaches to leadership development. In fact, only about half of all companies incorporate any form of leadership development at all. Of those that do, the vast majority are stuck in Phase 1 or Phase 2—relying on presentations or off-the-shelf products rather than developing customized solutions.

Here's how to assess where your company stands. Think about your current efforts to develop yourself and others and whether you agree or disagree with the following statements:

1. We customized our leadership development approach to the unique challenges we face as a company.

2. We own and can sustain our approach to developing leaders for years to come.

3. We seek to develop self awareness and emotional intelligence as opposed to "quick fixes".

If you answered "yes" to each of these questions, you're operating in Phase 3—true partnership. You're also ahead of the curve. Most companies are still trapped in the earlier phases of my evolution.

The Choice Before You

This brings me to a hard truth: companies that dabble in Phase 1 presentations or chase the latest Phase 2 trends may be better off directing their budgets elsewhere. Sometimes doing nothing is better than perpetuating the "Leadership Development Delusion."

Rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars on a keynote speaker or "copy and paste" leadership development program, consider less expensive alternatives. You may find that's a better use of your valuable leadership development dollars.

But if you're serious about developing leaders, you need a Phase 3 approach—one that provides the kind of returns you expect from any investment. For every dollar you spend on developing leaders, you can expect a return in the form of increased engagement, retention, and productivity.

Anything short of this amounts to a net loss. Not an investment.

The 4 Pillars of the Leadership Development Mythology

"A problem well stated is a problem half solved." -Charles Kettering

I’ve deliberately chosen to begin this series by defining the problem with leadership development. This essay introduces the 4 Pillars of the Leadership Delusion: information, insights, inspiration, and intentions, and the belief that these will lead to transformation. These pillars rest on a flawed assumption.

In reality, insights lead to intentions and intentions fade, and the leader eventually defaults to their previous state. As a result, leaders routinely seek out leadership development in search of lasting transformation but experience short-term inspiration instead. This highlights the need for approaches I will explore later in this series.

What is Leadership Development?

Let’s start with some definitions. The term, “leadership” implies the act of guiding a group of people in a particular direction. The leader charts the course for a particular destination. Leadership describes how that leader guides people in that direction.

“Development” denotes growth, expansion, and maturation. A leader that experiences growth demonstrates attributes that they did not previously possess. For example, if a leader learns to effectively calibrate their leadership to the unique personalities of the people they lead, we say that this person has developed in this particular area of leadership.

These two terms convene as “leadership development” to describe the experiences, resources, efforts, processes, and strategies related to helping leaders grow and mature.

When companies invest in leadership development, they do so with the assumption that their investment will yield a return. Much like investments in a portfolio, they believe growth among their leaders will produce far more value to the company than their original investment. No company would deliberately invest in leadership development in hopes that it produces little or no noticeable effects. Yet in most cases that’s exactly what happens—leadership development deludes leaders instead of developing them.

Why Leadership Development Fails to Develop Leaders—2 Reasons

The ineffectiveness and irrelevance that plagues leadership development stems from two primary reasons. The first is that leaders and the Leadership Development industry conflate inspiration with transformation. I focus on this theme in the essay that follows.

The second reason leadership development fails to develop leaders is that the theory and processes by which leadership development seeks to cultivate change draw from 20th Century management practices. I trust this connection will be more apparent when we delve into that section of this series.

A Tale of Delusion

I was recently having lunch with a friend when he began telling me about a leadership conference he attended in Chicago. The list of keynote speakers included bestselling authors and renowned leadership experts. He sat in the front row each day of the conference, and returned home with signed books, training manuals, and pages of notes.

“It changed my life,” he said, “I wish you could have been there. You would have loved it!”

The conference had clearly impacted my friend. I didn’t question his sincerity. But I was curious about how the conference had affected his leadership.

“How have you implemented your takeaways from the conference?”, I asked.

“Oh man, I’ve been slammed since I got back and haven’t had the time to do much with it yet,” he said. “But I have the training manuals on the bookshelf in my office and am planning to share them with my team soon.”

“When was the conference?”, I asked.

“About three months ago.”

I couldn’t help feeling dubious that my friend would find the time to share his insights from the conference with the team, but not because his intentions weren’t sincere. Like most leaders, it’s a function of time. If he hadn’t found time in the previous three months to implement his learnings from the conference, he probably wouldn’t ever get to it with so many other demands competing for his attention.

I’ve been part of dozens of conversations like this over the course of my career and notice they tend to follow a similar pattern:

1. A leader attends a leadership conference, workshop, or seminar series in order to develop themselves.

2. They gain valuable insights and takeaways that can impact their leadership.

3. Despite their best intentions, they eventually revert to old leadership behaviors and mindsets.

They may have gained other benefits, but development wasn’t one of them. This raises the question: Why do we refer to these experiences as leadership development if they fail to deliver leaders?

The 4 Pillars of the Leadership Development Mythology

A leadership development mythology makes the leadership development delusion possible for people like my friend. It’s rooted in the faulty notion that information will lead to transformation. It maintains that the difference between where a leader is now in their leadership and where they could be is a lack of having the proper knowledge or tools. It assumes that if the leader knows better, the leader will do better.

Four pillars support the Leadership Development mythology:

• Information: A leader learns a new piece of information, typically from a leadership speaker, video, podcast, or book.

• Insight: This information produces a fresh perspective for the leader.

• Inspiration: The insight fills the leader with inspiration.

• Intention: The leader finds themselves motivated to do and be a better leader and person.

This sequence mirrors the dopamine cycle. The process begins when a stimulus triggers the release of dopamine from neurons. As the dopamine binds to receptors we experience a change of mood and motivation. Through re-uptake, degradation, and recycling the dopamine eventually loses its potency which results in a normalized mood and motivation.

Leadership Development follows a similar pattern. Once the insights, inspiration, and intentions fade, the leader returns to a state of sobriety. My friend, like so many leaders, conflated the inspiration he experienced at the conference with transformation. Even though the conference made him feel like a better leader, he returned the same leader he was before the conference.

The Delusion Debt

Leadership development ought to perform like an investment—for every dollar a company pays into it, they should expect a return. In reality leadership development behaves more like an expense—instead of adding value and profit to companies, it increases their debt.

With my friend’s help, I calculated a conservative cost estimate of about $15,000 for him to go to the conference in Chicago. We included direct costs (conference fees, lodging, airfare, per diem, etc.) as well as indirect costs from losses in productivity for him and his team while he was away.

This is one small example of how the Leadership Delusion increases company debt. American companies spend more than $150 billion annually on education and training, according to a Harvard Business School publication entitled, “The Great Training Robbery”. These valuable dollars go toward programs, consultants, coaches, digital platforms, and live learning opportunities like the conference my friend attended.

The paper also includes a study in which 10% of the leaders surveyed say their leadership development programs were effective.

Imagine how you would react if you ordered 100 computers and only 10 of the computers worked. This is exactly what’s happening with leadership development—according to the study, for every 100 programs that companies implement, only 10 of them produce results.

Companies that recognize the mythology that cloaks the Leadership Development Delusion dispel the leadership development mythology. Instead of adding to their debt by funding momentary inspiration, they’ll experience valuable returns on their investment in the form of healthier, more effective leaders.

Concluding the Delusion

The purpose of this series is to help leaders and companies effectively develop their leaders. I’m going to highlight specific steps you can take to experience genuine transformation for themselves and the people they lead so that they can bring the Leadership Delusion to its conclusion.

Spells are best unwound by traveling back to the source. Only then will they lose their grip. I’ll begin with a brief review of how we got here. Deepening our understanding of the delusion’s conception will help you recognize it and avoid replicating it in the future.

In the next essay I will share a personal story of how I went from someone that contributed to the delusion to someone who strives to dispel and replace it with approaches that bring lasting transformation to the companies I partner with.

The Leadership Development Delusion

Why Leadership Development Fails to Develop Leaders

I’m letting you all know about a new series that will include my observations, critiques, and concerns about the way we seek to develop people within companies.

In keeping with the maxim—a problem well-defined is half-solved—I will define what I consider the flaws in current leadership, talent, and training trends, and how we got here. I’ll spend the balance of the series sharing approaches that disrupt the current direction of travel.

The Premise

This series arises from more than two decades spent in various roles within the Leadership Development space. I say this to highlight my proximity to—and passion for—helping develop people, not to imply I have all the answers.

It’s from this vantage point that I have arrived at the following premise:

Leadership development is out of sync with today’s workplace demands. Despite a radically changed economy, most development practices still reflect 20th-century thinking.

Companies in America spend more than $150 billion annually on training and education. The disconnect between 21st-century employer needs and how they try to address them contributes to a misuse of these valuable dollars. What should perform as an investment instead amounts to an expense. Harvard Business School refers to the current state of training and education as “The Great Training Robbery.”

But the cost extends beyond the bottom line. Leadership is a crucible for human growth. Yes, companies ought to invest in developing leaders as a means of improving performance and profitability. But these are individual humans we’re talking about—and when we fail to help them grow as leaders, we forgo the opportunity and responsibility to help them mature as human beings.

The Foundational Questions

This series will center around the following questions:

• What are we doing? I will provide an overview of the current state of leadership development.

• Why are we doing it? A range of motivations inspire companies to invest in developing their leaders—some that have little to do with their stated objectives.

• Why isn’t it working? I want to clarify why the vast majority of leadership development initiatives fail to demonstrate lasting change.

• What can we do about it? I will propose suggestions for how companies can improve the way they develop leaders.

Along the way, I will share past and current case studies from my own work as illustrations.

Who is this series for?

This series will appeal to people who seek to develop themselves and contribute to the development of others. If this sounds like you—especially if you’ve found traditional approaches lacking—I think you’ll appreciate what’s coming.

I look forward to kicking this off next week and interacting with all of you along the way. Please share this series with others as well. As you’ll see, this conversation has implications that extend well beyond our culture and economy.

Welcome to your journey toward Selfship

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

― C.G. Jung

What is Selfship?

I define Selfship as:

A person’s ability to effectively integrate their self awareness with their personal and professional relationships.

Where did the term Selfship come from?

You may have noticed something. Leadership books, podcasts, and other resources help people manage other people. Self Help resources help the individual in search of self awareness, mindset, and personal growth.

But here’s the problem.

Do you want to follow a competent leader that doesn’t know themselves? Likewise, a leader that possesses self-awareness but lacks leadership skills will struggle to gain the influence they need to guide others.

The most effective leaders draw from both disciplines. In fact, they don’t differentiate between the two. They practice Selfship.

Since the early 2000s, I’ve used the concepts, frameworks, and tools you’ll gain through Selfship with leaders. This is the first time that I’ve codified it into a step-by-step process that you can follow from beginning to end.

What are the benefits of Selfship?

How can I regulate myself when I’m triggered? How can I effectively engage the people around me and build healthy influence? Am I bringing the fulness of my authentic self to my personal and professional relationships?

These are just some of the questions leaders clarify through the Selfship Journey. If you find yourself asking these questions, maybe this is a good fit for you.

Let’s find out.

Who is Selfship for?

I’ve noticed over the years that Selfship resonates with a particular kind of person. They tend to:

• Live and lead with a greater level of intention than most

• Strive to continually expand their awareness of themselves and others

• They want to know what it’s like to be on the other side of them

• Take personal responsibility for their actions

• Lean into discomfort rather than avoiding it

But this journey isn’t for everyone. People that have an aversion to these characteristics shy away from Selfship. Their self preservation, commitment to comfort, and fear of what they may discover along the way prevents them from ever stepping foot on the path toward selfship.

Which description sounds like you?

I relate to both descriptions. I assume you do too, so I’ll ask you the same question I ask myself: Which description will win the day?

Now what?

I’ll be coming to you in a few different ways:

1. Letters that explain the concept we’re going through

2. Audio Notes that you can download to enjoy anytime and anywhere

3. PDFs that you can print and complete to track your journey through Selfship

We’ll kickoff your Selfship journey with two tools that set a baseline that you can use to measure growth.

How to get the most out of your journey?

Subscribe!

If you’re subscribed to Selfship, you’ll get everything you need for the journey.

Consume the letters and audio notes. If you’re like me, you may even read or listen to them several times to get as much as possible out of them.

Translate insights into action. I’m going to help you translate what you learn into demonstrable actions.

Also, don’t go it alone. Contribute your thoughts and questions, and inspire others. Share your experience with friends and co-workers. Invite them to join you. Post questions and thoughts in the Comments section. I’d love to hear from you.

You ready? Me too.

Let’s go!

Losing my Resistance: A Case Study

Reflecting on Resistance got me thinking about where it shows up in my own life. I didn't have to look very far.

For some time now I've known I have something huge to share. It may not be huge to everyone, but for a particular kind of person, it could forever change their life. No doubt about it.

It's all here in my head. If you rang me right now, I could talk you through it from beginning to end. It might take the better part of a week, but it's so clear that I know every detail along the way.

So what am I doing to get it out in the world? Sitting on it.

That's not entirely true. I've written an outline that's sitting at eleven pages, and I'm just getting started. And I've asked eight intrepid individuals to serve as a "test group" to provide feedback about the resource as I create it.

But what have I given them to review since I asked them five months ago? You guessed it. Nothing.

To which you may say, "Hey, 'Lighten up Francis,' you've got a lot on your plate. You have a wife and daughters that need you. You have clients you serve, kids' activities, working on the house, and so on. Don't be so hard on yourself."

Thanks for the encouragement. I need that reminder. But that's not what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is that decision point that I come to most days where I have to choose: Do I do the work to move this project along, or do something else?

That's the crux of it. For the last five months I've chosen to do something else...anything else. But why would I shy away from sharing that which I believe can truly impact another human soul?

Simple: putting myself and my ideas out for public scrutiny is scary as hell.

When I think of moving from outline to sharable content, I hear those negative voices in my head in all their cleverness, "What makes you think you have such a great idea? There's nothing really new under the sun. Remember, someone thought the AMC Gremlin was a good idea too."

But lately something seems to be shifting. I'm moving from outline to content that I can share with my test group, and eventually with anyone else that's interested. I've created three portions of the resource’s guidebook and recorded three "Audio Notes" to accompany the guidebook.

It's a daily battle. My naysayers wake up with me every morning. They line the stairwell up to my office and hurl their abuses. But rather than believe their lies, I acknowledge them like fellow passengers on a train. "Mornin'!"

Maybe I am designing the next AMC Gremlin, and maybe it too will confuse consumers, break down, and serve as a source of national embarrassment, but at least it will be my Gremlin, whether anyone else likes it or not.

But I believe it's far greater than that. It can and will forever change lives. Even if it just changed one life, I'd do it. And maybe that life is yours. Who knows?

Stay tuned.

The Real Source of Resistance

I'm a big fan of Steven Pressfield. The War of Art continues to make an indelible mark on my own creative journey. I've recommended that little book to countless people over the years.

But I disagree with him on one key point.

In The War of Art Pressfield deftly and relentlessly exposes the innumerable ways we sabotage ourselves. He lumps these strategies under one term—Resistance. These are the everyday shenanigans we employ to avoid showing up as the authentic individuals we were made to be.

So true.

He challenges the reader to flush Resistance from its hiding, and that Resistance does its best work incognito. From the safety of shadows it weaves and whispers its lies about our lack of competency and worth. And we believe it.

Preach it, Steve!

He's absolutely right when he says that "Everyone hears that same voice". Self deprecation is woven into the fabric of every human soul. In fact, it's so integrated into being human that we can't amputate this voice if we want to.

Yep.

He says, "That negative, self-sabotaging voice you hear in your head is not you. Those thoughts are not yours. They are Resistance. Everyone hears that same voice."

Nope. This is where I part ways with Pressfield.

Those negative voices I hear are me. All of the naysaying, sabotaging, self-destructive deceptions have one source: the guy in the mirror—and I divorce myself from these voices at my own peril.

Here’s why.

How do you respond when someone tells you that you don't have a voice in a conversation? Chances are you don’t take too kindly to it. You want to make your voice heard even more. Right? Why would Resistance respond any differently?

The surest way to increase Resistance is to disown it. Every effort I’ve made to distance myself from these voices makes things worse.

What’s the alternative?

I need to draw nearer to these voices not distance myself from them. I need to own them. But that doesn’t mean I have to believe them or be afraid of them.

The voices of Resistance may be my adversaries, but the relationship doesn’t need to be adversarial.

You and I are not so fragile that we can't sit and listen to these voices spout their nonsense for a few minutes. The voices are wrong. Dead wrong. They're utterly delusional. But you can still befriend them. After all, the voices are part of you.

Just don't believe them.

The 20-70-10 Rule

We were on an early morning run on the first day of soccer training camp in college when one of my teammates started boasting about how little training he'd done in the offseason. He laughed as he told us about his summer escapades, none of which apparently involved exercise. He didn't laugh for long. He groaned and hobbled around campus for the first two weeks of camp as his body tried to make up for lost time.

But he wasn't the only one that ignored offseason training. Each fall about 20% of the team showed up completely out of shape. About 70% coasted. They did the bare minimum over the summer and arrived on campus unprepared for the rigor of training camp. And about 10% arrived at training camp in top shape. I always strove to be in that top 10%, which meant frequent workouts on hot summer days, often on my own. It wasn't the easy path, but I knew I had to put in the work if I wanted to perform at the best of my ability.

THE 20-70-10 RULE

I have a prediction: When we emerge from the chaos that surrounds us right now, we'll look a lot like my college soccer team in late August: 

• 20% of us will decline—we’ll groan and hobble around as we try to catch up with others

• 70% of us will coast—we’ll regain our game fitness, but it won't be easy

• 10% of us will thrive—we’ll enter the “new normal” in better shape than we are now

We'll all know the truth of how we used our time when the season starts up again.

HOW TO THRIVE

Two things will enable you to thrive in the weeks and months to come:

1. Challenge yourself

• Expand your capacity for self-awareness

• Develop essential leadership skills

• Learn and strengthen your knowledge base

2. Support yourself

• Limit overexposure to media

• Connect with loved ones

• Move your body

• Eat well

• Structure your day

We're in the offseason, folks. The challenges of our present day offer each of us an enormous opportunity. Even though it's difficult, let’s persevere and use this time to develop ourselves so that we’re ready when the season starts up again.

A Different Way to Differentiate Yourself

You are different. No one else possesses your personality, perspectives, gifts, and experiences. Much of the value you contribute to the lives of others stems from your being different.

Those closest to you know you’re different, but what happens if your customers, clients, and coworkers fail to see how you’re different?

Is there anything you can do to help them see that you’re not like everyone else?

What’s “Different” about “Different”?

My bank recently debuted a new tagline: “Things are Different Here.” This tagline fails in part because it’s not true. My bank isn’t different. With a few small exceptions, their products and services are just like every other bank.

But there’s a deeper flaw in this statement that emerges when we compare it to Apple’s slogan, “Think Different.”

Both use the word “Different” and both infer positive associations with the word, but their similarities end there.

“Things are Different Here” draws attention to my bank. In a similar vein, a well-known hotel chain says, “You’ve come to a different place.” In both cases, these companies cast themselves as the hero in their taglines.

“Think Different” has a different hero in mind. It speaks to the “crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes … the ones who see things differently.” The hero of the Apple slogan is everyone that thinks different.

Why should you join my bank? Because they’re different. Why should you buy Apple products? Because you’re different.

See the difference?

Answer the Third Question

No one cares that you’re different. The fact that you’re different doesn’t interest the people—clients, customers, and co-workers—in the way we think it might. What they really want to know is:

1. Can you help me?

At their most basic level, people want you to solve a problem for them.

2. Do you enjoy helping me?

But people don’t just want you to solve their problems. They want you to want to solve their problems.

3. Do you know me?

At their deepest level, people want to know that you recognize them as unique individuals. They want to know that you know them, not just know about them.

You’re not in business for long if you don’t answer the first question. Fewer companies answer the second question. But if we want to build loyalty, we have to answer the third question.

How to Differentiate Yourself

An interesting thing happens when you answer the third question: People see you as different. From the sea of your rivals, you buoy to the surface, but not because you’ve talked about being different.

People come to see you as different because you first saw them as different.

Maybe the people you’re trying to reach aren’t “the crazy ones.” Maybe they’re buttoned up and boring. It doesn’t matter, I’ll ask you the same question:

Do you know them?

More importantly, do they know that you know them? Only then will they ever see you as different.

Turn Your Garbage Into Gold

We all have garbage. Some of it we can see. Most of it is we can’t. Customer complaints are as much garbage as a discarded Starbucks cup. 

The way we deal with our garbage reveals how we view ourselves, our customers, our culture, and our purpose.

Each year, for example, Walt Disney World averages 52 million visitors. Disneyland sees another 18 million. (That’s more than the combined populations of California and Texas.) Yet, not only will we never see any of their thousands of garbage cans overflowing, we’ll never see a dirty garbage can. Disneyland owns their garbage. 

Garbage, by definition, is a byproduct of our life and work. So long as it’s still around, it only serves to get in our way.

Disney doesn’t enjoy garbage any more than the rest of us. They just view it in a different light.

Turn Garbage into Gold

Zappos disrupted retail when they offered free shipping both ways and free returns. Shipping and returns are pure garbage for retail. Returned items not only cost the company in shipping, but also the item often can’t be resold by the retailer due to wear and damage. By offering both for free, Zappos turned garbage into gold.

We can all turn garbage into gold, but only if we have eyes to see the riches in the rubble.  

Owning Our Garbage

Zappos and Disney own their garbage. It’s deeply integrated into their business model and practices. You and I can adopt the same perspective when we integrate garbage into our lives. Rather than resist and resent its presence, we own it. We’ll even clean our garbage cans.

But before we do that, we need to differentiate what garbage should stay and what must go. 

Necessary and Unnecessary Garbage

We all have two kinds of garbage: the garbage that must stay and the garbage that must go. We’re on boards for seven different organizations that consume hours of time each month. Ninety-eight percent of our Twitter and Instagram feed. That’s garbage that must go. To pull from my previous definition of garbage, it only serves to get in the way. It’s self-imposed and, therefore, unnecessary. What’s left when we clear out all of the unnecessary garbage is the garbage that must stay. Customer emails, returns, business development, hiring and firing—these we can’t avoid. They’re necessary garbage. The question is whether or not we own and integrate them, or whether we resist them. 

Garbage is unlikeable, but we can grow to like the way we deal with it. I suspect Disney and Zappos derive a sense of pride from how they deal with their garbage.  

We’ll never like our garbage, but we can take pride in the way we deal with it, especially if we turn it into gold.

Your Competition is NOT Your Enemy

Rivals, competition, and enemies—we all have them. The problem is that we confuse the three. In our confusion we misdirect precious time, attention, and resources, which contributes to malaise, frustration, and underperformance. 

We perform at our best when we accurately identify all three. We gain ground on our rivals, rise above our competition, and claim victories over our enemies. 

Rivals

Rivals have one goal: to defeat one another. This is as true of Steph and LeBron as it is of Apple and Microsoft. Though we may at times wish they would go away, our rivals make us better. They drive us deep within ourselves where we uncover capabilities we didn’t know we had. True rivals value one another, which helps explain why it’s not uncommon for rivals to be friends, or even family members. Where would Serena be without Venus? Image where you would be without your rivals. 

Competition

Our competition shares nothing in common with our rivals. As John Wooden said, “The best competition I have is against myself to become better.” We are our competition. Our competition reminds us that we can do better and to expect more from ourselves. When we compete with ourselves, we know we can defeat our rival and still lose, and only when we compete at our highest level possible can we truly claim victory, irrespective of the outcome.

Enemies

Our true enemy lies within each of us. The enemy will do anything in its power to hamstring our ability to perform at our best. Fear of criticism and inadequacy sabotages a leader’s ability to perform at her best. Distrust drives down a team’s capacity for collaboration. Misalignment within a company contributes to inefficiencies and confusion. Whatever its form, defeating the enemy requires that we not confuse our enemy with our rival or competition. Such confusion ensures our defeat.

Nike’s True Enemy 

Nike, for example, performs at their best when they recognize that Under Armor and Adidas are not their enemies. They’re not even Nike’s competition. They’re Nike’s rivals. Conversely, Nike loses their way when they confuse the three. The same is true for all of us—as individuals, teams, and companies.

Who is Nike’s enemy? Since their inception, Nike has had one enemy, though it goes by different names—laziness, self-doubt, and even shame. This is Nike’s true enemy. It’s at the heart of the company, which is why they perform at their best when they rightly identify and align their resources against this enemy. They resonate with consumers because we see our story in the Nike story. We’re both fighting the same enemy. 

Life as a Story

Binge watching wouldn’t exist without tension in a story. Tension comes from the struggles, villains, and conflict within the story. These make stories worth watching. Your enemy makes your story worth telling. Without your enemy, you wouldn’t be who you are. Your enemy is an essential character in your story, as long as you’re sure you’ve rightly identified it.

Three Reasons to Celebrate (and the Real Reason You Don't)

“So when do we celebrate?”

I know what you’re thinking, “Celebrate? We don’t have time to celebrate. We’re too busy getting things done.”

But this is among the most important questions you can ask. Why? Because we’re a bunch of  forgetful, ungrateful whiners.

Getting things done feels good, but head-down obsession with our daily tasks leads to a project-induced stupor in which we can forget the purpose behind our projects. We know we’re making progress. After all, just look at those checked boxes. But to what end? We’re not sure.

Celebrating wakes us from our stupor. When we celebrate, we pause to acknowledge one another and what we’ve accomplished.

If celebrating is so important, why don’t more of us make it a priority? I think I know why.

Three Reasons to Celebrate

Before explaining why we don’t celebrate, let me give you three reasons why we should:

Celebrations remind us of the past.

When we celebrate, we look at where we’ve been. We remember what we’ve accomplished, what’s gone well, and what we would do differently.

Celebrations ground us in the present.

When we celebrate, we clarify our progress thus far in a project. We can take stock of the people and resources we have in place as we move forward.

Celebrations pave the way for future success.

When we celebrate, we generate momentum for future efforts. Whether we’re celebrating mid-project or at the end of a project, we reconnect with our team and with the purpose of the project.

The Real Reason You Don’t Celebrate

I ran into a friend yesterday who’s a designer. The last time we spoke she had just been recruited by a large technology firm to head their digital design efforts. Having spent nearly a year at the company, she’d grown concerned about its culture. She described an environment in which people don’t trust each other. What really drives her nuts is how everyone seems to be content with mediocrity.

My friend became increasingly agitated as she spoke until she finally exclaimed, “We never celebrate!”

She went on to say, “We limp to the end of projects and eventually complete them, but by then we just want them to be over.”  (Sound familiar?)

How could celebrating possibly help this situation?

Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his book Notes from Underground, says that the best definition of a human is “a creature who walks on two legs and is ungrateful.” Though I want this only to be true of my children and not of myself, if there were a Lack of Gratitude award, I’d probably finish in the top three, or maybe even win it outright.

We’re ungrateful because we’re hopelessly forgetful. We’re productive—employing our best project-hacking measures to slice and dice our way through tasks—but we remain in a project-induced stupor. We know what we’re doing, but forget why we’re doing the project in the first place.

What Happens When You Don’t Celebrate

Celebrating connects people. As my friend can attest, failing to celebrate separates people.

I was recently speaking with the CMO of a large health care company who was furious after a meeting about his company’s new mission and values statement.

“We’ve been working on this for months,” he said, “and the lead on the project said that she just wants to get it over with.”

When I asked how they were going to celebrate it, he laughed and said, “Oh, we’ll do the same old same old. Send it around to everyone and wait for the crickets to start chirping.”

This company would have achieved far greater returns on their mission and values project if, from the very beginning, they had made celebrating a priority.

Instead, news of the project will dribble out through email to everyone else in the company.

Chirp. Chirp. Chirp.

A Celebration Case Study

A tech company asked me last year to help a group of their brand leaders develop their storytelling skills over the course of a year. I worked with an internal team to develop the project and prototype it before implementing it. The project came together beautifully and the prototype surpassed all of our expectations. We knew this project was going to be something special.

Rather than rush to implementation, we paused to celebrate. It wasn’t elaborate. We ordered in lunch, raised a glass to commemorate our accomplishment, and took some time to acknowledge the talent and effort we’d each contributed to make the project such a success.

Then we launched. As we’d hoped, the project went well. The leaders loved it and said they were able to immediately improve their ability to use storytelling in their daily lives.

The project came to an end, and you can guess what we did. We planned a nice dinner out to celebrate. We shared, laughed, and listened as we each reminisced about what we’d done together.

It would have been so much easier not to celebrate, but we planned for it from the very beginning of the project.  

How You Should Celebrate

I celebrate every Friday afternoon. Inspired by Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, I spend about forty-five minutes writing down what I’ve accomplished in the past week and I forecast what I’d like to accomplish the following week. Finally, I write down one thing I’m grateful for. I try to be specific, otherwise I’d write down things like my family, my health, and my career every week. For example, I find it helpful to write down something like, “I’m grateful that my daughter and I had lunch on Wednesday.” It’s not that I would have forgotten these things, but apart from this weekly ritual I would have forgotten their importance in my life.

Something inexplicable happens each time I do this. Without fail, I draw in a deep breath the very instant that I remember the things I’m grateful for. I feel at peace with the past, present in the moment, and confident about the future. That’s what celebrations do.

Three Steps You Should Follow

Whether I’m going through my Friday afternoon weekly review or planning a project, celebrations always include the following three steps:

1. Plan it.

You can decide exactly how you want to celebrate later, but you have to plan for it now. If you wait until the project starts, you’ve waited too long.

2. Personalize it.

Tailor your celebration to fit your culture and the context of the project. Know your team and what they would appreciate.

3. Protect it.

Excuses for why you shouldn’t celebrate will mount as you near your planned celebrations. It’s your job to ensure that doesn’t happen.

In the coming weeks I’ll wrap up the strategic planning process with a health care company. We’re going to spend a two-day retreat completing the company’s plan and prepare to implement it. At the close of the second day, you can probably guess by now what we’ve got planned. Yep, we’re going to celebrate. You should too.

The End of Uber: How "Storyless Brands" Fail

The Storyless Brand

A brand built on profit alone has no story. Of course, a brand without profit has no future. But survey the strongest brands in the world, or even in your neighborhood, and you’ll find a common thread: their story sustains them.

A brand’s story captures our loyalty because their story overlaps with our story. Their villain is our villain. Their portrait of a hero aligns with ours, and we discover that they’re going where we want to go. We value the product and service they provide, but what we really value is that we’re part of their story, and they are part of ours.

A brand’s story is their identity. It’s the brand’s lifeblood. It explains why a brand exists, the purpose it serves, how its unique from other brands, and every other element of a brand’s identity.

But what happens when a brand doesn’t have a story? 

It dies.

How did Uber decline so quickly?

My oldest daughter and I loaded into an Uber in downtown Seattle on our way to see U2 play at CenturyLink Field last May. I noticed the driver’s windshield also featured a Lyft sticker.

“Which do you like better, Uber or Lyft?”, I asked. 

“They’re pretty similar,” the driver said, “but I prefer Lyft. They treat their drivers a lot better.”

“Which do you use when you travel?” I asked. I wanted to test his loyalty. 

“I use Lyft whenever I can,” he said.

Employee loyalty is the “canary in the coal mine” for a brand’s health. Strong employee loyalty breeds a solid customer fanbase. And brands that haven’t earned loyalty from their employees find their foundation rotting beneath them. 

The driver’s lack of loyalty made me suspect that Uber may be in trouble.

And I was right.

The video of an altercation between an Uber driver and then CEO and co-founder, Travis Kalanick, came out just a few months before. Sexual harassment allegations, controversy over their response to Trump’s immigration policy, and several high level resignations sent Uber into a nosedive as 2017 unfolded. Under mounting pressure, Kananick finally resigned as CEO.

So how could such a prominent brand decline so fast?

Do NOT “Start with Why”

One of the most watched TED Talks ever is Simon Sinek’s 2009 TEDx presentation where he encourages brands to “Start with Why.” Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

Sinek’s right about the value of Why for a brand, but he’s wrong when he says we should “Start with Why.”

We should start with Who.  

A brand’s Who is their identity. Their Why arises from their Who. Their identity is the beginning. This is where we should start. 

Uber doesn’t have a Why because they lack a Who.

Uber thinks they have a Who, but what they call their identity is just a great idea—Ridesharing. A good concept alone isn’t enough to sustain a brand. A brand needs substance, integrity, and purpose. 

A brand predicated on profit lacks a story. Consider what Logan Green, co-founder of Lyft, Uber’s main competitor, says about their culture, “The company culture is about being human, being good to other people.”

That’s a story that excites employees and resonates with consumers. Despite Uber’s concept and profits, they lacked a story.

Now we recognize Uber for who they are: a Storyless Brand. 

Can your employees and customers see themselves in your story? 

Strong brands function as a story. We see ourselves in their story and want to be part of it. 

Your brand story is your foundation. It sustains all other aspects of your brand. Know your story, own your story, communicate your story in everything you do.

The result is a story that draws us in. We want to be characters in your story.

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Brand Amnesia: Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment

Brand Amnesia plagues millions. Apple, for example, suffered a bout of Brand Amnesia after they fired Steve Jobs. They regained their senses when he came back.

Unchecked, it leads to brand obscurity and, in many cases, the death of the brand. What's worse, the majority of the brands that have it don't know it.

Given its prevalence (and the fact that I made up the term) I thought I'd explain Brand Amnesia, what causes it, how to avoid it, and what to do if you discover you have it.

Definition:
Brand Amnesia, also known as brand dissociation, is a memory disorder that affects brand leaders and is characterized by episodic memory loss, said to occur for a period of time ranging from months to years.

Diagnosis:
Obvious signs of Brand Amnesia may include:

• Personality confusion, in which the leader mistakes his or her brand for another
• Confusion about ones brand identity
• Difficulty articulating a cogent brand story
• Erratic, unexplainable shifts in ones identity
• Inability to retrieve stored memories that preceded the onset

Prevention:
Brands who wish to avoid Brand Amnesia’s debilitating grip need leaders with courage and a strong sense of their own identity identity. A leader who doesn't know his or herself can't help a brand know itself.

Prognosis:
With said leaders installed, the brand can capture, clarify, and commit to their brand story. They can become the loyal shepherds the brand deserves.

Warning Signs, and Risk Factors:

• Holiday party speeches that sound strangely similar to the one from the year before
• When asked to describe their brand story the leader's jargon-laden explanation rivals a presidential State of the Union address in unnecessary length and lack of clarity
• Referring to brand initiatives as "fluff" or otherwise dismissing their value
• Obsession with other brands, especially competitors, which can alternate between worship and seething disdain
• Turnover among vendors and staff related to culture, marketing, and sales

Causes:
Brand Amnesia stems from a single cause: fear. Fear about the insufficiency of ones own brand spawns episodes that vacillate between aggression and wedging ones head under the cushions of an overstuffed couch. But don't be confused by such behavior. It's fear cycling through a rotating wardrobe of disguises.

Possible Treatment:
Leaders need to be reminded about the brand's authentic story. For best results, read the story aloud. This may chase dormant memories out from hiding. Consider also reading aloud books like Extreme Ownership or The Failure of Nerve. These too may arouse latent memories and, with time, help a leader remember the brand's true identity.

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Walk In Stupid

"See, when you don’t know, you try desperately to find out. But the minute you think you know, the minute you go – oh, yeah, we’ve been here before, no sense reinventing the wheel – you stop learning, stop questioning, and start believing in your own wisdom, you’re dead. You’re not stupid anymore."
Dan Wieden, Co-Founder, Wieden+Kennedy

Mike stepped inside our house, took off his boots, and shuffled across our wood floor in his wool socks. He walked into our kitchen, set his toolbox on the island, leaned against the counter, and removed his glasses.

Then he turned to my wife and asked, “What’s the problem with the washing machine?”

As my wife described the issue, Mike tipped back his head and closed his eyes. He looked like a sommelier letting the tasting notes of a fine wine wash over him. For several minutes he asked my wife questions and listened.

Pivoting like a marriage counselor, he turned to me and asked, “And what do you notice about the washing machine?”

“This guy is an appliance therapist!” I thought to myself.

He listened to my description with the same curiosity and intention he showed my wife, again closing his eyes and occasionally running his fingers through his grey, bristled hair as he thought.

Then he was done. Mike grabbed his toolbox and disappeared into our laundry room for the better part of two hours, emerging once or twice only to clarify something my wife or I said.

Mike’s brilliant. Having worked on several of our appliances over the years, I now realize that his experience and comprehension of physics and electricity qualify him to teach courses at most any college. 

Which is why the most remarkable thing about Mike is that even though he’s been in countless kitchens and laundry rooms, dealt with the same problems with appliances day after day for more than 40 years, he walks in stupid every time.

Why? Because he genuinely cares — about his craft, about his customers, and about their appliances.

We all used to be like Mike. As children we brimmed with fascination.

But then we got smart. Our knowledge of the world expanded and our curiosity shrank. Our teachers and bosses rewarded us for knowing (or at least pretending to know). We stopped asking stupid questions.

And we watched as our curious mind, along with our careers and the companies we worked for, calcified.

But I want to be like Mike. Don’t you? I want to walk in stupid every time.

And here’s the good news for others who want to be like Mike:

We can retrain ourselves to ask stupid questions. 

You’re not alone. Curious people find other curious people.

There are leaders and entire companies that value people who ask stupid questions. They’re the ones driving innovation: LEGO, Pixar, Patagonia, IDEO, and many others.

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
Walt Disney

Retrain yourself to walk in stupid. Ask yourself the following stupid question:

How many uses can you think of for a single paperclip? 

We’ve trained ourselves to think of paperclips fulfilling a single function. This exercise challenges us to view the same object in a fresh light. Keep in mind that children typically outperform adults in this exercise.

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What's Your Fall In Factor?

I just started reading The Hobbit to my two youngest daughters. Each night as I sit down on their bedroom floor, open the book, and start reading, something magical happens: all three of us fall into the story.

We’re no longer in a bedroom. The three of us enter the story and travel along side Bilbo, Gandalf, and the others on their journey. This explains why every night my daughters say the same thing when I close the book:

“Don’t stop reading!”

Great stories have a “Fall in Factor” that captures us and won’t let go. The same is true of great brands.

You’re probably accustomed to thinking of your brand as having stories that you communicate through messaging, marketing, and advertising. Your brand has a lot more in common with The Hobbit and other great stories than you think.

Just like a great story, great brands have a villain, a hero, struggles, crises, and resolutions. These elements reach out and captivate us.

Nike’s villain, for example, isn’t Under Armor, Adidas, or any other competitor. Nike’s villain the human proclivity for apathy, laziness, self-doubt, and disdain of losing. Read Phil Knight’s biography, Shoe Dog, and you see that this was true from the very beginning of Nike’s story.

Clarify and protect your brand story. It’s yours! Don’t let it devolve into someone else’s story.

Ask the following questions at your next team meeting to clarify your brand story:

Who is our true villain?
What does it look like to be a hero in our brand’s story?
What distractions prevent us from moving our story forward?
Everything becomes more clear when we view our brand as a story. We remember who we’re fighting, what we’re fighting for, and our role in the story.

You build that “Fall in Factor” that every brand craves. The people who come in contact with your brand will say the same thing:

“Don’t stop reading!”

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