If you want to seem contemporary the next time someone shares a story about a leadership development program, try out this chestnut: "Our people development efforts are increasingly non-programmatic." To complete the effect, never lift your eyes up from your gold iPhone 5S.
Even in the face of budget cuts, travel restrictions, and some 25 years of hype about digital learning, occasionally a company still holds a plain, old-fashioned leadership development program. Some consider these increasingly rare events to be an antiquated relic of the past. Mocking the program as a “fuddy-duddy” method seems to be a prerequisite for membership into the “cool kids club” at any sophisticated conversation by sophisticated people about the latest learning and development.
Many folks agree about the decline of the program, but there's much less agreement about what exactly will replace it. So, in the meantime, programs happen. And some claim there's still no substitute for getting folks together in the same spot at the same time to be challenged and provoked. Case in point: the fuddy-duddy writing this article.
Making the case for the traditional leadership program
I work to make live, in-person programs full of meaning and impact. I believe that no pre-work, virtual intersession gathering, post-program follow up, or on-demand, just-in-time, web-based learning nugget in the cloud has the potential to transform and galvanize a community of leaders as powerfully as a well-run program.
Bottom line: Sometime no cloud nugget can do the job of a clear, compelling teacher.
Sure, it’s good to have:
- some primer to get folks ready and excited about a program
- a way to sustain the connections and community between programs
- access to reminders of the key concepts from a program
- a way to hold people accountable to each other to make sure they deliver the things they committed to in the program.
But the main event is still the main event. Too often, all of the attention paid to non-programmatic elements of leadership development is an attempt to make up for a lack of great programs. This is no surprise. Programs are starving for more innovation and professionalism.
Leaders play a bigger and bigger role
Many leaders have decades of experience learning to lead, but they usually have only a few hours of experience learning how to teach leadership. To compensate, L&D professionals arm their execs with a supposedly bulletproof set of painstakingly developed exercises, videos, or charts. This seems a wildly inefficient exercise. Instead of working so hard to make sure an amateur won't fail, why not use a professional?
While amateurs teach leadership development programs, the best and brightest learning minds work to revolutionize learning. With so much focus on non-traditional techniques, the critics of programs are, sadly, often right with their diagnosis that programs look shabby by comparison.
But that’s a result of a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you predict traditional programs will be less important in the overall mix, and you therefore don’t invest in making those programs better, then you end up ensuring that programs are, in fact, the weakest link.
Instead of accepting this reality, the plain old program deserves some fresh attention. In particular, I have three wishes:
- Encourage more Boomers to help more emerging Gen Y learning pros learn how to teach leadership. Don’t let decades of learning and experience in the core skill of standing and delivering get lost amid the noise of non-programmatic technology. Before the most experienced leadership development educators retire, let’s make sure they share what they learned from a career on the frontlines.
- Apply more energy innovating inside the classroom, not just outside of it. Too often the accepted wisdom is, “We’ve mastered the classroom, so let’s think about the other stuff.” But master teachers prove that there is still room for innovation in the program. I worry that the young professionals who might become the master teachers of tomorrow are too busy learning about MOOCs and Drupal to learn how to make learning happen in a program.
- Resist the easy path of over-reliance on “leaders teaching leaders.” It panders to the executives who want to enshrine their legacy (and cut costs), and it panders to the participants who crave the attention of those execs. And it robs leadership educators of the opportunity to practice their craft. If a leader decides to move to a fulltime teaching role, that leader should approach the transition with the seriousness of any other significant career change. It’s hard to do a part-time job in a world-class way.
Don’t starve high-quality leadership development programs of fresh thinking. And don’t let the cloud nuggets take over.
