Leadership Training Everywhere – But Not a Drop to Drink

New metrics alone won’t ever eliminate the need for leadership training. One of the challenges of leadership development is that leadership is different from organization to organization. What makes for a good leader at GE doesn’t match what makes a good leader at Google. To truly make an impact on results, companies have to spend the time to define leadership competencies that align with the values, culture and desired business outcomes. Once those competencies are defined- appropriate metrics can be set. It could be internal promotions, if one of your competencies is around developing your employees. It could be based on alignment of employees’ goals to overall goals, if one of your competencies is around communicating strategy. Point is, it would be difficult to define one set of metrics that would work for all leadership. Because of the complexity and uniqueness of leadership at each individual organization, you see all the thousands of different approaches, consultants and theories.
Most interesting nowadays is model of distributed leadership- where we move away from the traditional hiearchy towards the nextworked collaborative models, and through in global teams- lots more complexity being layered onto to leadership models.

I totally agree with your premise of measuring leadership. Another good metric is degree of employee engagement per leader (summary measure isn’t as meaningful). There are a number of engagement factors that get measured that can be directly attributed to both the employee’s direct boss as well as senior leadership at higher levels.
Cheers!
Marty Jordan
Human Capital Consulting Partners
http://www.hccpartners.com

Paul — Wonderful post. Your friend at lunch sounds brilliant! Who paid?
Seriously, I’m looking forward to the input from your readers.

Paul — Seriously, excellent post. I’m interested to see what your usual posters have to say. To repeat what I told my daughter recently: “Enjoy those times when you have a good boss, because bad bosses are the norm.”
However you define good and bad bosses — and that might be an interesting discussion as well. And it certainly makes AMP less than a “gimme” too, doesn’t it?
Does that square with the consensus? If so, why?

You know I love to look at the “why” part of the human behavior equation. But it still makes me wonder if we either aren’t teaching/communicating what leadership is – or it’s just another check box on the list and we really only want to pay lip service to it. So much of what I see at companies related to performance is leaders not understanding what makes people tick and reinforcing that I just wonder if we need to measure different things in order to reinforce the training.

Appreciate the input – and you’re right. There are many companies that don’t take into consideration the employee point of view. There are many though that do 360 degree reviews from the supervised employees. My experience though – not very honest or truthful for fear or reprisal. Not to say it shouldn’t be done just that we need to be cognizant of the fact the info may not be accurate.
I will say this – if you’re concerned about how your employees would rate you as a manager – that’s a great first step on being a good manager. But remember – not a popularity contest. Sometimes being a good manager is being a tough manager and that may show up in the survey!

I get that – but my concern is that it would seem we’re not doing enough to “raise” leaders through our leaders. In other words, our those responsible for the next generation of leaders doing their job – or simply taking the classes and doing the same things they did before (mostly because that’s what they are measured on?)
We need to instill cultural changes and systemic changes in how we raise good leaders in a company.

QUOTE:
“Having a wonderful lunch with a friend and former client yesterday we talked about the top problems companies face and the topic of leadership came up. We puzzled about the sheer number of consulting firms that offer leadership training, the number of blogs and articles on leadership, and the focus most companies put on leadership. My friend’s experience indicated that poor leadership seemed to be a root cause of a lot of the other problems typically encountered at a company (I’m paraphrasing a bit – after all it was an hour-long lunch.)
But even with all that focus on leadership – we still have the problem.
We ended with this question…”
———————————————
This long paragraph adds nothing to your article.
THIS IS PLENTY:
With so much information about leadership available, why is it still a big issue?

Paul,
I think a lot of leaders just want to please their boss and fit in. A lot of the leadership training is forgotten and they just want to rise up in a culture that may not have good leaders. A lot of managers get on a power trip and don’t think about being a good leader, they just care if they look good to the guy above them. These are scenarios where leaders mistreat employees to get what they want out of them, numbers. Working them hard and treating them like they don’t matter, then blowing up when one thing goes wrong. I liked this article a lot, and I couldn’t agree more that we have so many resources on leadership and yet it seems like the leaders haven’t learned at all.

Paul,
I agree with your argument. It seems that at many workplaces, including my own, there are plenty of ways to measure performance based on profit and the bottom line, but not enough to measure how a manager interacts with their employees and their peers. Have you read anything about standout companies that might do things differently? I’m curious how companies that are commonly thought of as “employee-oriented” deal with mid-level management metrics (perhaps Google for instance).

help me out here, paul. why is it better to have more of your employees leave to start their own business than to employ their initiative in your company?
another metric that i think says a lot is how many people say they understand the business strategy, they know where they fit in, they say they have the skills and training to do the job required, and they feel valued for doing it.
f

ah, cheers. that’s hard to measure, but i completely agree w/the approach. would love to see more companies find ways to let people have free rein to bring their great ideas and ambitions to fruition w/in the org.
f

You are correct we need to measure leadership using metrics other than financial ones. Your suggestion to measure turn over is more of the same thing companies have been doing forever. Based on your examples you are measuring good turn over which is a start but what about other leadership qualities? How do leaders rate on other leadership qualities? Treatment of employees? Do manaagers treat all employees with respect regardless of their differences? Do managers create an environment that incents employees to do their best or go beyond their basic job responsibilites? Do they trust their manager? Do managers sincerely care about employees and their family? While these questions may seem like simple questions, these are strong leadership qualites.
You need to define the skills that make a good leader and measure them often!

Do you think that MBA programs in colleges should have leadership classes as required courses (meaning that if a student fails his/her leadership class, he/she doesn’t get MBA degree. Period.) or such classes should be optional? Come to think about it, how about high schools or even earlier? I wonder if it’s possible to teach a person to be a leader or it’s all in our genes? Either one has it or not, the rest is just refinement.