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:
A leader attends a leadership conference, workshop, or seminar series in order to develop themselves.
They gain valuable insights and takeaways that can impact their leadership.
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.