Asking leaders to step up and take on the challenge of leading each day in an organization presumes they know how to lead effectively in the first place. Presuming leaders have the skills and talent to lead effectively is rarely a sound assumption.
The good news is that most leaders want to be better. The bad news is they don’t know how.
After a century of developing leaders in the antiquated format of training sessions and workshops, most professionals in the space will tell you that approach simply fails to deliver. While leadership training and assessment can occasionally enhance the conversation necessary for development, it doesn’t sustain the focus on getting better. The Sage on the Stage and one-and-done training programs sound great, but as soon as they are over, leaders get back to work and rely on doing what they have always done.
As it turns out, learning how to lead, like virtually everything else, requires an ongoing conversation that never ends. To scale leadership across an organization, large or small, leaders must engage each other in an ongoing discussion of best practices specific to the challenges and culture they live in.
When peers come together in a frequent cadence to discuss common challenges, share best practices, and learn together, leadership development becomes galvanized in a vibrant way.
The best organizations invest in programs where leaders are peppered with leadership ideas and practices worth listening to, watching, and reading. Coming together, not to listen to experts, but to discuss what best practices can be distilled from the lessons and how they can be implemented in the workplace is a force that moves the ball forward in a big way.
Best practice discussions, led by the organization’s own senior leaders, make the effort highly engaging and memorable. Nothing matches leaders teaching leaders as long as we remember it is a continual conversation, not a presentation, that imprints leadership excellence.
To truly scale leadership, design a program that doesn’t allow leaders to talk at each other. Ever. Instead, create an uninterrupted conversation that invites vibrant debate and discussion about how to lead. Leave the abstract ideas, frameworks, and theories for those executive education classes at universities that are more geared toward passive learning.
To scale leadership across an enterprise, an investment in ongoing dialogue about how to lead is the principal requirement. That doesn’t mean this is easy. The discipline to sustain a never-ending conversation is something foreign to most leaders. But if scaling leadership is the ultimate goal, it is the only thing that truly works.
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