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Military academies have an impressive record of producing outstanding leaders. This stands in stark contrast to the developmental efforts of many civilian organisations, with Australian research showing that less than 15% of what is learnt in a typical training course is transferred into new workplace behaviours. So what can you learn from the military? Here are four key lessons:
- Be selective about whom you develop
- Connect learners to trustworthy, practical knowledge
- Include strategies that help learners turn new knowledge into new behaviours
- Help learners to change who they are as both leaders and people
The first of these lessons is reflected in the highly selective nature of admissions at military academies. The remaining three lessons were found within the U.S. Army’s Be-Know-Do model of leadership.
Lesson 1: Being Selective
Investing in leadership development is like investing in the share market in that you are far more likely to get a return on your investment when you are careful about whom you invest in. Just as some companies are likely to show higher share returns, some people are far more likely to develop their leadership prowess than other people. This is due to a combination of:
- A desire to learn (perhaps in response to challenges in the workplace, life stages or an intrinsic desire to be more than they are today)
- A threshold of leadership potential (such as general intelligence and interpersonal ability)
- Learning agility (including openness to experience, adaptability and self-awareness)
The lesson is that, wherever possible, you should have managers apply to take part in your in-house development programs and that you should use sound methods to select only prime candidates from those applicants.
Lesson 2: Include Trustworthy, Practical Content
Most managers learn how to lead on the job through trial and error. They form beliefs about the organisation, about the people within it and about leadership in general based on a small sampling of personal experience. This is somewhat akin to letting people believe that smoking is safe based on the personal experience of one smoker who happened to live to the age of 82. Sadly, leadership programs that peddle the latest management fads muddy these tenuous beliefs even further, as many of these fads have little, if any, grounding in evidence.
At the other extreme is the isolated world of academia, which despite being more reliable can also be too theoretical and obtuse for managers to put to any immediate and practical use.
The lesson is that you need to ensure that your programs connect learners to knowledge that is both trustworthy and practical.
Lesson 3: Help Learners to Develop New Behaviours and Habits
As any sports enthusiast can attest, the world is full of armchair experts. However, there is a big difference between knowing what to do and being able to do it (and do it well).
“The gap between knowing and doing remains a weak link in most of our lives”
Dan Millman, No Ordinary Moments
Leadership programs are more effective when they help learners to bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Imagine for a moment that you wanted to learn how to juggle three balls. You can read and digest the instructions for how to juggle in just a few minutes. However, this does not mean you can now juggle. Learning to do something requires strategies that are different from those used to simply acquire new knowledge about how to do it. Behavioural learning uses strategies such as modelling, practice, review and refinement.
The lesson is that within your program, you need to show learners what to do, allow them to practise doing it and give them feedback on their efforts so that they can refine their future attempts. These initial efforts need to be supported by post-program strategies, such as coaching and action-learning, which help your learners transfer their new skills into their approaches to leadership within the workplace.
Lesson 4: Challenge Learners to BE More Than They Are Today
Leadership is not just about what you know or the skills that you possess. It is about who you are as a person and the sort of leader you choose to be. While lesson 3 highlighted the need to bridge the gap between knowing and doing, lesson 4 highlights the need to close the gap between doing and being. This involves helping leaders evolve their identity, their values and their perceptions.
This form of personal development is not a new idea; it is already central to the military’s process of developing future leaders. In fact, it provides a common thread between the outdoor challenge programs and t-groups of the mid-twentieth century and ties into our obsession with emotional intelligence[3. See, for example, the content and the developmental process outlined in Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2004). Primal Leadership. Harvard Business School Press.] in the 1990s and authentic leadership in the 2000s.
“There is more in us than we know. If we can be made to see it, we will be unwilling to settle for less.”
—Kurt Han, Founder of Outward Bound
However, researchers have only recently started to explore the empirical links between leadership and identity.
The lesson is that you should help leaders to discern who they are and to redefine who they want to be as part of any serious effort to develop their ability to lead well.
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Collective Wisdom – Melbourne – 30 April 2010
Collective Wisdom is a unique program designed for intact leadership teams (or similar). Research shows that, when properly facilitated, groups make better decisions than individuals do. In this ½ day program, participants will learn how to use the art of round tabling to bring their collective wisdom to bear on any creative challenge facing the group.
Click here to read more or register
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Coaching for Leadership – Brisbane – 16 April
Do you want make personally tailored improvements to the way you go your work as a leader?Leadership is personal. It is about what you do, not just what you know. More specifically, it is about what you habitually do and do well. This assessment driven program will highlight your strengths, weaknesses and tendencies as a leader so that you can choose personally relevant areas to improve. You will then be assisted to develop a plan that will help them turn good intentions into lasting changes in your approach to leadership.
Click here to read more or register
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Hard Conversations – Sydney – 9 April
Successful leaders deliver results through the impact they have on those they lead. Words are a key way through which leaders achieve this impact. In our Hard Conversations 1 day program, participants learn how to use feedback, coaching and confrontation to shape the attitudes and actions of those around them.
Click here to read more or register
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Have you ever wondered about developing leaders through outdoor experiential education? While it is not something that we offer, as an educational organisation committed to raising the standard of leadership development in our country, it is something we encourage you to try.
Outdoor experiential leadership programs involve physically challenging activities, such as falling backwards off a ledge into the waiting arms of fellow participants or leaping from a high platform to a rope or swing that is out of arm’s reach. Other popular activities include abseiling, ropes courses, rafting, rock climbing and sailing.
Research shows that leaders who participate in outdoor experiential programs, such as Outward Bound:
- Are more likely to remain in your organisation
- Develop self-confidence, a trait consistently associated with effective leadership
- Become more agile problem solvers
- Nurture teamwork
References
Appreciate Inquiry (AI) is the brainchild of doctoral student David Cooperrider and his advisor, Suresh Srivastva, who developed the concept during their involvement in the doctoral program in Organizational Behaviour at Case Western University. With its accentuation of the positive, AI is a significant departure from previous experiential learning models, which tended to focus on trying to learn and adjust behaviour by reflecting on what wasn’t working.
The four stages in appreciative inquiry are:
- Discovery—identifying existing strengths
- Dreaming—describing the best possible future imaginable
- Designing—a plan for change
- Destiny—implementing the plan to realise the dream
Appreciative inquiry is typically viewed as a tool for developing and changing entire organisations. However, the underlying concepts of learning and change are also relevant to helping individual leaders develop themselves. In fact, helping a leader to link their own development to events around them is the fundamental constant of all experiential learning models. AI is different in that it provides an affirmative, forward-thinking context for your development. For example, it asks you to focus on such questions as:
- What achievements am I most proud of? What personal strengths underpin those successes?
- Where do I see myself in five years? What will I be doing? What sort of leader do I really want to be?
- How can/will I use and build on my strengths to turn this dream into a reality?
Then, as you execute your plan, you regularly reflect on what you are doing that is helping you change and how this insight can move you ever closer to your dream.
Have you been thinking about using visualisation in your training? While it’s true that novel training techniques such as visualisation add interest and help keep people engaged, they can fall short of their full impact if used incorrectly. In this article, I’ll provide some evidence-based guidelines for using visualisation to its maximum potential.
Perhaps the most common form of visualisation used in corporate development asks participants to create a vivid mental picture of their own idealised future, one in which they are achieving all of their goals and living a dream life. While this form of visualisation may help learners to clarify their hopes and dreams, it does not (on its own) facilitate the fulfillment of those aspirations. It’s not enough to simply ask learners to visualise what they want; you need to ask them to take the next step and visualise how they will get it.
Research shows that visualising the steps you need to take in order to achieve your goals has a real and significant impact on what you subsequently achieve. This form of detailed, process-oriented visualisation is often used by the sporting elite. Serving as a sort of “mental rehearsal”, this tool can prepare one’s mind for the execution of a physical act while helping to reduce or eliminate the self-doubt that often accompanies such activities. A related concept, “muscle memory”, refers to the natural or instinctive tendency of the body to perform an action a certain way, usually due to repetition of that action (e.g., one’s golf swing). The term implies that this tendency resides in the muscles themselves because this is the way it feels. However, the proficiency is clearly a mental one. Visualisation, therefore, can help strengthen and reinforce the mind’s ability to perform these actions the desired way as long as it is focused on the user’s technique. That is, as long as it is focused on what the athlete needs to do.
While visualisation has proven useful in developing physical prowess, the benefits it provides are not limited to this arena. It can can be readily adapted to help bring desired behavioural changes within the workplace. In addition to serving as preparation for a physical action, visualisation also helps focus one’s attention on the specific tasks at hand. Outlining these tasks in as much detail as possible will help maximize the effectiveness of this process.
By asking your training participants to move beyond simply visualising what they want into the realm of how they are going to get it, you turn mere wish fulfillment into an action plan. Furthermore, visualisation can increase their chances of success in enacting that plan by mentally preparing them for each individual task they need to undertake in order to reach their goals, increasing the likelihood that they will remain focused on and committed to reaching them. Think of it as developing “muscle memory” for achieving success.
While leadership can be developed, it is not always easy to so. There is never a guarantee that your well crafted programs will work, but there are a few proven actions that you can take to stack the odds in your favour. One such action that is often ignored by HR and L&D professionals, involves systematically seizing the opportunities presented by people’s career transitions.
Put simply, there are certain times in people’s lives where they are challenged to take stock of who they are, to reinvent who they want to be and to question their beliefs about the realities around them. One easily identifiable window of opportunity presents itself when people move into new leadership roles – from being a staff member to becoming a manager, from being a functional manager to becoming general manager or from a from being manager in one location to being a manager in a different location – for at these times people are psychologically ready to learn and they are open to changing their approaches to leadership. Yet, few organisations seize this opportunity by implementing company-wide transition programs. ‘Transition programs’ are markedly different from ‘induction’ because they focus on the changing individual rather than on the specific requirements of the new role. A typical transition program involves learners in identifying what they:
- Need to let go of from their previous ways of working
- Want to and realistically can hold onto from their previous ways of working
- Have to start doing that they didn’t do in their previous ways of working
Transition programs offer a structured, generic and open-ended way for people moving into new roles to discover the leader they now need to be.
“Nothing is so well learned as that which is discovered.”
Socrates
These programs are process rather than content driven, they are supported by newly formed developmental relationships, and they provide a psychologically safe space for learners to explore new views on leadership.
It is a fact that people are more likely to learn when they are motivated to do so. Here are three practical steps you can take to get people motivated about the courses you run:
- Before the course—sell rather than tell
- During the course—challenge your learners
- After the course—assess their learning
Sell Rather Than Tell
Should you force managers to attend your in-house courses or should you just hope the right people will attend? The answer lay somewhere between these two extremes.
Sadly, we run many in-house programs in which participants have been forced to attend. While some of these people are happy to learn, many of them spend their time being difficult and disruptive, wasting the opportunity and interfering with the process for their fellow participants. Not only are people more likely to benefit from courses that they have chosen to attend, the atmosphere of the entire program is noticeably different.
However, you should not simply let people know that courses are available and then hope that some attend. Motivating potential learners takes more than leading them to water and hoping that they drink. Your role is to make them thirsty, and this involves the art of selling. Marketing 101 states that you do not sell anything by describing its features or talking about how good it is. Rather, you need to show how your course can help managers with their problems, fears and desires.
Challenge Your Learners
While having a group of learners who actually want to participate is a very good start, you can further increase motivation and in turn maximise the efficacy of the course by challenging participants to move outside of their comfort zones.
Novelty is perhaps the most common way to challenge learners during their training. Try incorporating some unusual activities into your program. Just remember that what was once fresh and new can quickly become overused and lose its novelty as it becomes mainstream. Another way to challenge learners is to give them difficult tasks in which they must apply what they’ve learned. For example, we often ask small groups to present a persuasive proposal to the board (i.e., the other participants) when we run training on how to influence others. A third way to challenge learners is to incorporate activities in which people must work with conflicting points of view.
Assess Their Learning
People are more likely to be motivated to learn when they know that their learning will be assessed. Unfortunately, in our field, certificates are often issued just for turning up regardless of whether any learning has actually occurred.
At minimum, you want participants to know that they are expected to understand the material covered in your course. This can be achieved through a traditional test, which thanks to technological advancements, can be taken and scored online with very little effort on your part. Of course, knowledge alone is not enough. Ideally, you want people to go about their work differently after attending your course. Therefore, you want them to know that you will be assessing their ability to perform certain skills, both in isolation and on the job. You can build on-the-spot skill assessment into the course itself by having participants work on practice drills in small groups. During these drills, one person takes on the role of observer, making notes (criteria sheets are useful here) and then offering feedback to their colleagues. You can conduct post-program assessment of on-the-job changes in behaviour using a simplified survey form administered to each participant’s colleagues.
Each of the participants attending your training is going to arrive with a different level of motivation depending on their demeanour and circumstances. But by following these and other successful strategies, you can optimise the overall effectiveness of your program. Do you have additional strategies or techniques you’ve found useful?
Do you systematically groom existing managers for higher levels of management? If not, you should. According to research reported in Harvard Business Review, CEOs promoted from the rank and file are far more likely to render exceptional performance than those selected from outsiders.
So how do you develop a successful succession plan?
Unless you have an unlimited budget, your first step should always be a systematic process for identifying true potential. As I explained in an earlier article, uncovering leadership potential is quite different from making judgements about people’s existing performance. Being a star individual performer demands different capabilities than successfully leading others. There are also marked differences between the capabilities required at different levels of leadership. Your role, therefore, is to predict as accurately as possible who is likely to succeed in higher levels of management, then systematically develop those individuals.
But what does systematic development entail?
Firstly, despite some popular notions to the contrary, research shows that CEOs with an MBA are more likely to be successful over the long term than those who lack this qualification. So one of the simplest ways to develop future leaders is to sponsor them in completing a formal MBA program. There is also a growing trend in which managers are given a series of short-term job placements to broaden their perspective and hone their skills in different parts of the business. Another simple strategy is to sponsor professional reading on a broad base of leadership and business topics by providing subscriptions to periodicals such as Harvard Business Review and Soundview Executive Book Summaries.
Finally, we suggest that you have a three-tiered series of experiential programs:
- One for aspiring or newly appointed managers with a focus on transitioning from achieving results based on their own efforts to achieving results through the impact they have on others.
- A second program for mid- to senior-level managers that focuses on leading staff outside their own professional field and leading other managers.
- A third program for general managers, CFOs, CEOs and other leaders at or near the very apex of their organisation with a focus on strategy, business acumen and transformational change.
The success of your programs hinges on a clear understanding of the difference between learning and development.
Learning
Learning involves increasing knowledge. You can learn in the classroom or by reading a book. Yet, if your aim is to create better leaders, increasing their knowledge is not enough because leadership is all about what people do, not simply what they know. You cannot learn how to dance, how to play the piano or how to ice skate from reading a book or attending a PowerPoint presentation on the topic. How much confidence would you have in a pilot or a builder who had learnt about their craft without ever having practiced it? Yet, most leadership training is delivered using this “knowledge-based” approach to learning. As a result, Australian research shows that less than 15% of what is learnt in a typical training course gets transferred into sustained behavioural changes within the workplace.
Development
The ultimate aim of any leadership program is to change the way people approach their work, and this requires development, not learning. Unlike “knowledge-based” learning, development entails mastering new skills and turning those new skills into habits.
“The great end in life is not knowledge but action”
Thomas Henry Huxley
While there are many aspects that support behavioural development, none is more important than practice. Practice allows leaders to master new skills and embed them into their work habits. To create true development, a leadership program must not only allow time for practice and refinement during the course, but also create an environment that encourages leaders to continue practising and refining new behaviours once they are back in the workplace. Neuroscience shows that with sufficient practice, new approaches to leadership form their own neural circuits within the basal ganglia, thereby becoming a subconscious habit. This process is very similar to what happened when you first learnt to drive a car. Of course, practice is even more helpful when it is coupled with active observation and refinement. This can be achieved through personal reflection as well as through the use of structured observations.
Most people do not start out pursuing a career in leadership. Instead, they begin work within a specialised field such as teaching, medicine or engineering. If they are good at this specialty, they may then be pressed into a management position and start slowly making their way up the ranks.
At some point, they find themselves managing people outside of their own specialized area. Their CEO may even start demanding that they adopt a broader and more strategic view of the business as a whole. As Marshall Goldsmith points out, what worked for them before is no longer what is being asked of them in their new role. In fact, research suggests that a failure to adapt to leadership beyond their past specialist sphere is a prime source of executive career derailment.
How, then, can you help them?
The answer is through four relatively inexpensive processes, which you can adopt as stand-alone strategies or integrate into a comprehensive program.
Job Rotations
Nothing builds understanding like experience. One of the most powerful ways to broaden people’s perspectives is through planned job rotations. Traditionally, job rotations have involved putting someone into a role for a year or more, but there is a growing trend of placing people into a variety of short-term roles to better round out their skills. Of course, you need to pace your rotating placements in a way that the business can handle without adversely affecting critical aspects of performance. However, if done well, a structured job rotation program amongst senior divisional managers returns dividends that are well worth the short-term cost.
Simulations
Experience is a great teacher but sometimes we need to learn its lessons in advance. Simulations are a great way to induce insight that cannot be fully appreciated from a textbook alone. The beer game is a classic simulation that highlights how the actions of a seemingly independent unit impact upon other seemingly independent units. It is a great way to get general managers thinking outside of their divisional silos. The simulation takes less than three hours to run and debrief, and you can purchase it from the System Dynamics Society.
360-Degree Feedback
360-degree feedback is a great way to open managers’ minds to the need for change in their current approach to leadership. However, many organizations go about 360-degree feedback the wrong way. Their first mistake is to use homegrown instruments that save money and give the process a “company” feel. However, such instruments are rarely based on research into what makes senior leaders effective and they normally lack psychometric rigour in their design. I suggest using a well-designed, commercial product such as Executive Dimensions, which is specifically for senior leaders. It costs more, but in the grand scheme of things, it really is a very small investment.
The other common mistake many organizations make with 360-degree feedback is to link it to formal performance appraisal systems. To be effective, leaders need to be open to hearing the message the 360-degree feedback reveals. If the results are public and linked to any form of performance review, leaders spend all their energy defending themselves and dismissing the results, so no learning occurs. It is well worth paying an external coach to manage the process and deliver the feedback in a confidential session.
Sponsored Reading
You can help people develop the same level of expertise in business and in leadership as they already have in their specialist area. HR need to know about marketing; marketing need to understand customer service; customer service need to understand HR and they all need to understand leadership. You can stimulate this broadening of expertise by sponsoring some professional reading. Get your general managers a subscription to key periodicals such as the Harvard Business Review. Invite them to sign up to trustworthy blogs and newsletters such as Leadership Skills Australia and Smartbrief. And let them speed read the latest and greatest business books in summary format by signing them up for a subscription to Soundview.
