Leadership development is broken. Companies want to keep growing their revenues and headcounts, but they aren’t investing properly in areas such as succession planning or upskilling to prepare their leaders for the future.
For instance, in a recent survey of nearly 14,000 leaders across 50 countries and 24 industries, only 40% said their company had high-quality leaders — a 17% drop from two years prior. In addition, 50% of all CEO respondents said developing the next generation of leaders was a top challenge for their organization. So, while most organizations recognize that their leaders need to be developed, few companies are able to provide that development.
NLI’s research suggests that part of the reason for this gap is a misunderstanding of how to effectively develop leaders. Often, executives believe in at least one of four myths. When firms can spot these myths and work to counteract them, they stand the best chance of building a strong, healthy leadership pipeline that can adapt to the needs of the organization.
The 4 myths
Let’s break down, one by one, what we’ve found to be the four biggest misconceptions about leadership development.
Myth No. 1: Top-down training works best
The reality: Everyone-to-everyone training works best.
Organizations often believe that if only the top 50 executives or top 200 senior leaders at the company get trained, their new ways of working will trickle down to leaders at lower levels. While it’s true that getting buy-in from executives does make culture-change programs more effective, this trickle-down effect is massively overrated. If only a fraction of the people in a company are role modeling the desired behaviors, they’re unlikely to catch on.
The best way to build new skills is to train every leader at the same time — through a process of social learning, in which new habits are built together and rooted in moments of strong insights — so that people learn as much as possible. We call this “everyone-to-everyone learning.” In this model, thousands of people can go through the same lessons at the same time, delivered virtually.
In most top-down learning, people quickly forget what they’ve learned, and so they don’t share it with employees at lower levels. But with everyone-to-everyone learning, an entire staff can go through several weeks of training and begin sharing and modeling the lessons right away, creating a deeper impact.
Myth No. 2: Leaders at different levels need different training
The reality: Although the context may vary, leaders at all levels need many of the same human skills and habits.
Executives and front-line managers have very different roles, but the amount of necessary skills they have in common is much greater than people realize. Often, the context for using the skills is just different.
For example, all leaders need to learn the skill of empathy, but typically for different uses. A front-line manager might need it for relating to a team member who just had a child, while an executive may need it for managing government stakeholders. Front-line leaders might need conflict resolution skills to settle an argument between co-workers, while executives may need them for crisis management following a public scandal.
The upside of training leaders according to shared research and models is a more tightly woven set of ideas among seniority levels (what we call coherence), less complexity and confusion among models, lower costs, shared language, and ongoing communal development of core skills.
Myth No. 3: In-person experiences make the greatest impact
The reality: Leadership development is most effective in a distributed, digital approach.
Organizations put a lot of stock in one-to-one personal coaching and in-person retreats. They feel more intimate and, therefore, seem more capable of creating long-lasting behavior change. While these learning approaches have their merits, the science of learning and culture change make it clear that in-person learning isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
Our research suggests a digital platform that combines the best elements of social learning can achieve greater scale in much less time, with more long-lasting results than coaching or retreats. In fact, our work with Fortune 100 companies, where headcounts are often in the thousands, has shown that virtual platforms can achieve organization-wide behavior change in weeks, not years.
The reason for this is when lessons can be distributed across an entire workforce, people can learn bite-sized amounts week to week rather than cram information into one or two long sessions. Learners are able to build new habits incrementally. They enjoy what neuroscientists call a “spacing effect,” in which the brain can consolidate new information into long-term memory. Learning a little bit on a consistent basis, rather than a lot all at once, leads to greater long-term retention for everyone.
Myth No. 4: Leadership development is a one-off experience
The reality: Leadership development is a continuous process.
Leadership development isn’t a box to check, like renewing your driver’s license. It’s more like staying in shape: Just as someone needs to nurture their fitness on an ongoing basis to maintain their health, organizations must treat leadership development as a continuous process so that leaders can build and retain the necessary skills.
While it might be cheaper in the short term to host a few training sessions and call it a day, the most successful and resilient organizations make it a priority to invest in developing their leaders on a regular basis. The investment is worth it because the future is unknown and unknowable — and there’s no telling when a leader needs to be ready to meet an unforeseen challenge.
Planning for the future
Leadership development is less of a pyramid and more of a web. It’s not the case anymore that managers ascend the ranks at predetermined intervals. Business is much more fluid and unpredictable, and each division and department within an organization has its own needs that leaders are called upon to meet.
But, contrary to how most companies handle leadership development, the most successful ones recognize that certain skills are core to every leader, not just the top of the house. When people learn the same material as their peers at the same time, they enjoy enormous learning benefits that translate to higher performance.
In addition to these learning benefits, leaders start to develop a common language, which strengthens and reinforces culture overall. Rather than 10% of the company’s leadership doing one thing and 90% of the leaders doing another, approaching leadership development as a shared activity will build a muscle of resilience that keeps the organization strong as current leaders leave and new ones arrive.
