Beer, M., Finnström, M., & Schrader, D. (2016). Why leadership training fails - and what to do
about it. Harvard Business Review. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1827620237/
Organizations invest billions of dollars in leadership training, but their return on investment, in terms of organizational productivity, is scant. Some leaders see their organizations as the aggregate of individuals who are selected and developed for specific skill sets or jobs. This, however, ignores the reality that organizations are built of systems that interact and affect one another, and that a firm’s design and its management process lead the way to an organization’s performance. Six barriers exist that get in the way of organizations focusing on their design and management processes: unclear mission, values, and strategy towards their implementation that contribute to conflicting priorities, senior leadership that does not work as a team particularly about needed changes and how that impacts their own behavior, failure to have honest conversations because of leadership style, lack of cross-unit coordination because of poor organizational design, leadership’s failure to devote time and attention to talent concerns, and employees’ fear of sharing their feedback on the organization’s effectiveness. In order to address these six concerns, organizations and their leadership should clearly define values and strategy to achieving it, those involved in change management efforts should gather anonymous employee data to learn about barriers to strategic execution and redesign roles and responsibilities to address this, coaching and consultation help people become successful in these new roles, provide training where needed, create new metrics used to gauge success of behavior change, and develop a new system to select, evaluate, develop, and promote staff changes to reflect new desired organizational behavior.
Reading this article, I said “yes!” out loud several times. As an employee who has seen many ways processes can be improved to better serve the organization’s mission and productivity, along with its employees, these strategies are actionable ways to generate a meaningful shift. One of the challenges I see with several of these activities is effectively highlighting the ways leadership is not maximizing its potential for impact, but the article gives me tools to better communicate these opportunities.
LO2: demonstrate the ability to assess complex organizational environment and achieve communication goals.
LO3: address complex challenges by collaboratively leading teams across disciplines, distance, and sectors.
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