Leadership
killing leadership
BY DAVID JAMES
What people see and experience in their day-to-day life will have a bigger impact on them than any development program or training course.
And if there is disconnect between what is taught and what is seen, then people will take on the behaviour they see role-modelled and rewarded. So how exactly might your organisation be killing your leadership development initiatives? And perhaps more importantly, what should you do about it?
Whether consciously or not, role modelling isn't just the most powerful factor shaping your emerging leaders; it's also potentially the biggest threat to the success of your programs.
Role-models
In a recent investigation into role-modelling in organisations, Brown and Tevino explored the impact that ethical and unethical leadership has on those who look up to leaders. The good news is that people do prefer to have ethical leaders, as this extract describes:
'When you play fair, communicate directly, and in general demonstrate that you hold high standards, other people actually do look up to you… taking the moral high ground may be the one that ultimately benefits you as well as those who look up to you as their inspiration.' - Brown and Treviso, Do Role Models Matter? An Investigation of Role Modeling as an Antecedent of Perceived Ethical Leadership, 2013.
Unfortunately, we are not all afforded the choice of who leads us but it’s in the contradiction of what we expect our leaders to do and what they actually do that we can see the positive work of the L&D function come undone.
What leaders in your organisation do
'Those who have made it to the ranks of executive have legitimacy afforded to them by virtue of their status.' - Brown and Trevino, 2013.
Your emerging and growing leaders will be looking to your senior leaders for their definitions of excellence and acceptable behaviour – which can be very different from ethical behaviour.
If the CFO is a tyrant and makes a habit of belittling people in meetings then it's easy to see how this could be accepted behaviour.
Could I now qualify that in the context of your leadership development program?
If we accept this behaviour as 'ok’ because it's ‘just him' - could that not send mixed messages – for example: around authenticity? If authenticity is confused with being the uncensored version of you then we're in trouble. It doesn't matter what you say to your delegates because this is one example of inappropriate behaviour that - if not examined and accounted for in your program - speaks more loudly than any of your content.
Behaviours that seem to be rewarded
Role-modelling is incredibly powerful for instilling organisational behaviour, even if organisational rhetoric is in direct contradiction. An example of this is a culture of working long hours. Can I ask you if your organisation's leaders tend to stay later in the office and perhaps share stories of late night conference calls? This is something that can't be flippantly dismissed with a comment in a leadership development program – or with a Time Management module. But needs to be acknowledged and explored as a topic of ‘culture’ and not ‘skill’ or ‘habit’. If presenteeism is the issue then new ‘tools’ aren’t the solution.
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38 | TRAINING MAGAZINE EUROPE MARCH 2015
development