Thought on the future of leadership development
After experiencing Silicon Valley, here is how I see
leadership development shifting:
• Challenge first - It’s going to be more
around unpacking concrete challenges. There are a lot of angles to take on
leadership development, and right now the dominant approach is a
competency-based one, or rather a package of competencies based on a generic audience
such as first time managers. I think we will shift to a challenge –first approach,
with mindset, toolset and skillset to support that particular challenge. This
shift might also help us in the ancient problem of providing evidence of the
impact of leadership development. If the approach gets more concrete, so does
the impact.
• Continuous – Anyone with a background
in education theory or the functioning of the brain can tell you learning is
unlikely to happen in an event – it happens by spaced repetition and practice over
time. We’ll move to more longitudinal
approaches over your career, rather than events at certain transition moments.
• Career of people over time – Which
brings me to the point of the shift in focus to the learner (which we’ll just
call people) and less on the buyer or intermediary (eg HR L&D). The focus
will also be on supporting their career over time, not limited to certain jobs
in a particular company. Think of learning services that will be your career
aid over time rather than an in-company program. Oh, while I’m at it: with
career we don’t necessarily mean a traditional ‘pipeline’ career of moving up
but rather a series of ‘mini-careers’ most of them in self-steering and
empowered project teams.
• Really 702010: I foresee a shift
enabled by technology to support the 70 more. Classrooms will still be around
and important events, but maybe a ‘twice in your life’ thing rather than the
default approach. To that end we’ll need to figure out a way to embed
development into the daily work and give it a proper space. I’m not thinking of
consumption of micro-content here, but to have a learning process in place that
ensures micro-moments for reflection, feedback and coaching, etc. As the saying
from someone goes: learning is the work and the work is learning. The one thing
professionals cry out they don’t have is time, and yet that is precisely what
development takes – not in big chunks but in regular micro-moments.
• Augmented leadership: What does ‘augmented’
leadership look like? If we see how poorly managers are on average rated by
their employees, it makes me confident that at least some tasks of managers can
be automated by Artificial Intelligence or augmented by it. Automation of intellectual
labor is probably not going to take entire jobs, but parts of it, similar to
how office productivity tools have not replaced entire jobs but rather
supported certain tasks of knowledge workers. Maybe if we do it right this time
AI tools will not just raise expectations so we need to work even harder as
leaders but maybe we’ll get back a bit of our lives from the ever demanding
drain of the work time. Most leaders, especially middle managers signal us that
they are at the limits of what they can handle. This might help.
Shocking thoughts
The trip in Silicon Valley also triggered a few more shocking
thoughts – at least to me.
• Is
the Net Promoter Score no good anymore? A startup company called worthix.com
made me doubt. I’ve always believed the Net Promoter Score to be a good
reflection of customer satisfaction but the NPS of Kodak was great before it
collapsed. This particular startup claims that 8 ‘scientifically proven’
questions starting by asking ‘was it worth it’ are a better indicator…
• Will
centralized platform be the future, or will they be countered by ‘peer to peer’
technology? Basically most business models today assume control of a platform
where your users go to and leave their data for you to exploit, and enables
other partners to build upon through your APIs. But in the struggle for power and
control of (privacy) data we see platforms that are purely peer-2-peer. So are
platforms still the future?
• Generations
are not that different. OK, we have the millenials coming, and it is a great
thing. But basically generations in general and people in particular get
heavily influenced by what happens to them between the ages of 11 and 16. For
the post-war generation that meant a lifelong fight against scarcity. For the
millenials that means having parallel opportunities as they saw established
institutions and certainties go south during that important time in their life.
• People
don’t want to learn, so I was told. At least not as a goal on itself. People
want to know things or be able to do things (better). And learning is just a
way that gets them there. Now that’s a sobering thought.
So, that are some thoughts I had.
What are yours?
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