Why Leadership Training Fails And What To Do About It - Part 5

A New Capability Development Strategy

Even in companies with strong leaders and healthy cultures, discrete units require distinctive roles, responsibilities, and relationships—and distinctive capabilities to function in them. Moreover, each unit is probably at a different stage in its development.

So CEOs and their HR chiefs must be sensitive to local variables when defining an integrated change agenda—one that simultaneously addresses performance improvement and capability development. To do that, they should answer the following questions, first at the top and then in each major unit:

Is the leadership team aligned around a clear, inspiring strategy and set of values?

Has the team collected unvarnished employee feedback about barriers to effectiveness and performance—including senior managers’ own behavior?

Has the team redesigned its organization, management systems, and practices to address the problems revealed by that diagnosis?

Is HR offering consulting and coaching to help employees learn on the job so that they can practice the new attitudes and behaviors required of them?

Do corporate training programs properly support the change agenda, and will each unit’s leadership and culture provide fertile ground for it?

If your answer to any of those questions is no, your company is probably (with the best of intentions) over investing in training and education and failing to put talent development in its proper strategic change context.