The Origins of Leadership

PUBLISHED APRIL 2024

Author and leadership-development guru Matt Tenney, writing for Business Leadership Today.com, notes that organizations around the world spend a combined $60 billion a year on leadership development. 

The ROI on that spend? A 28 percent increase in critical leadership abilities—however that’s measured—and a 20 percent pop in the more metric-friendly category of performance improvement. 

If those don’t strike you as reasonable returns on investments of that scale, you can look to a number of factors for sub-par dividends.

Tenney is not alone among leadership development experts who say one of the biggest factors limiting the effectiveness of those efforts is that the training many people receive simply hasn’t been designed to align with an organization’s strategic goals. Generic leadership instruction is fine as far as it goes, but if, say, being an elite-level communicator doesn’t help a manufacturer produce better, lower-cost widgets more efficiently and effectively than its competitors, that training investment might have been better spent on an equipment upgrade.

Guidance on building effective leadership training is as ubiquitous today as self-help books on finding peace of mind, losing weight, or dealing with teenage children. But if you go through enough of it, you’ll find some universal themes that can apply to any business. For starters:

Focus on outcomes. 
For law firms, that might be producing more billable hours; for battery plants, it might be raising annual output at lower costs; for hospitals, it might be improved marks on patient-satisfaction surveys. The point is that your business has unique strategic needs that set it apart from every other one out there—even direct competitors in the same space. Tailor your development efforts to produce leaders who have the skills to improve your odds of reaching those strategic goals.

Lighten up on the Theory. 
Too often, theoretical principles are over-emphasized with off-the-shelf programs for developing leaders. Of course, they are: like any business, the developers are interested in selling more programming at the lowest production cost. They are not tailored to your company’s unique mission or interests, so they may come up short on real-world applications. Shop for the instructional models that will clearly advance your organizational goals.

Don’t stop learning—even at the top. 
You have to demonstrate to your leadership team and staff that you don’t know everything. If they believe you think you do, you’ve dug yourself a talent-retention hole, and that’s only going to compound the challenge of finding that committed cohort of potential leaders.

Don’t stop learning—even at the top. 
You have to demonstrate to your leadership team and staff that you don’t know everything. If they believe you think you do, you’ve dug yourself a talent-retention hole, and that’s only going to compound the challenge of finding that committed cohort of potential leaders.

Collaborate. 
This isn’t Vegas, so what happens with leadership development shouldn’t stay with the leadership team. There are other stakeholders. Rank-and-file employees, for starters. You need to understand the traits they need in leaders if they’re to be effective in their own jobs. And if what your leadership team does touches customers, you might want to find out what they need from your lieutenants. 

A Team-First Approach. 
So you want Dave in production to improve his time-management skills and Sally in HR to hit her targets for delivering annual performance reviews. But if you’re teaching to the test, so to speak, your reliance on individual development may come at the cost of better team and organizational development. Dave and Sally may come out of your training motivated to improve specific aspects of their own performance, but it can’t stop there. They must be able to inspire better performance in their own reports down the line.

Cross-Training Isn’t Just for Jocks. 
Do you want your leadership team to be in sync with strategic goals? Then get them in sync on operational goals: Cross-functional training can help them see how their performance, and that of their teams, impacts other operational silos in your workplace.