Leadership Development programs - the vicious cycle of solving the wrong problem...

 Why does the business world put so much effort and attention into the Leadership Development programs? Seriously. Have you ever wondered what problem these try to solve?

 

Let's do a round of all stakeholers involved to understand their perspectives and expected value. Clearly the intention of Sponsors is to develop leaders to be better leaders, to perform better, to be more effective and to build a stronger organization. For Participants, it's nobilitating to belong to the leadership cohort, they feel special and rewarded. For Trainers and Coaches, training leaders is nobilitating as well, it brings a lot of self-esteem, so they feel special and rewarded, not to mention remuneration aspect. Indeed I met whole flocks of consultants who dreamt about getting access to the leadership development level programs. This is the level where one can feel impactful. In this vicious cycle everyone feels happy, so it lasts.

My challenge is: Leaders know what to do, they do not need special trainings. We, human, are good and justice and ethical by nature, by design, we are equipped to make right decisions. The real question is why leaders cannot apply all the goodness and the knowledge in their organizations? Why do leadership efforts not blossom, and do not stick in spite of best intentions?

Here is my perspective: leaders cannot apply their natural goodness and wisdom, because the goal and the rules of the game of companies are different, leaders' goodness does not apply in this game, and is neither compatible nor usable in the context of the current purpose of companies. 

My call today is: Trust your leaders, do not try to change them, instead change the environment you need them to operate within - change the companies instead. Transform companies into good citizens of the world by redefining their social meaning and purpose.

Photo by Mathias Jensen on Unsplash

The Testament of a Furniture Dealer

The Testament of a Futniture Dealer, by IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad. 

A skeleton of thinking behind perceived IKEA behaviors. 

A masterpiece. 

An appetizer quote to build your appetite: 

“No method is more effective than a good example.” 

 

The Source: here.

A brief recap of Stephen Denning's Leadership Storytelling TEDx talk

As Stephen Denning says: 

The most important role of leadership is to tell stories. Why? Because nothing else works.

Characteristics of a good story:

1. Share a True Story - not a Titanic story that hides important negative details
2. Be Positive in Tone - share a story with a happy ending, not to trigger the reptile brain of your listeners
3. Be Minimalist in form - let the listener imagine, envisage and discover how to implement details, because it's when s/he internalizes the idea as her own idea. And that’s what you want, that’s when you are off to the races. If it’s my idea only, says Denning, nothing much happens. Once it becomes their idea it is when they become champions).
4. Contrast pre and post change worlds - the story need to contrast the situation before the idea was implemented with the situation after the idea was implemented.

With big complex ideas you can easily get lost in the story and miss the point of the story.

For the full story one definitely wants to read the Stephen Denning's book: The Secret Language of Leadership.

Professor Stefano Zamagni in Leaders For Humanity

A truly human perspective on how the world could do better.

I have learnt so much on human thought of economical systems and their relation to societies from this webinar...  A must watch for every builder of the future of work! Thank you Otti Vogt! 

The front-runners: We are not slaves of GDP - TED Talk of Michael Green

Another building block to raising awareness of sustainability and civilizational debt we have been creating - Michael Green's TED Talk back from 2015, just after the United Nations announced their Global Goals by 2030. 

I encourage you to watch the whole talk, let me just quote the breakthrough observation:

Social Progress Index representing the UN Global Goals by 2030 cumulatively can grow unrelated to growth of GDP per capita.

There are countries that prove it is possible to get lot's of social progress even if your GDP is not so great. 

(...)

Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability and as a result it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP.

(...)

And that's really important because it tells us two things:

First of all it tells us that we alreay in the world have solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. It also tells us that we are not slaves to GDP. Our choices matter. If we prioritize the wellbeing of people than we can achieve a lot more progress that our GDP might expect.