Don’t miss these steps when developing your leaders

The goal of leadership development is behaviour change, and based on everything I’ve seen, tried, and learned over the past 20 years, I’ve found that these three steps best make it possible: 

STEP 1: DEFINE

Define the leadership behaviours crucial to your organisation's success to create a leadership framework aligned with your purpose, strategy, values, and brand.

STEP 2: DEVELOP

Use your leadership framework to underpin the design and delivery of a leadership development program specific to your organisation and business context. 

STEP 3: DO

Implement a support system for behaviour change and doing the work of leadership that incorporates structure and accountability driven by relationships (leaders and their leaders, leaders and their peers, and leaders and their teams).

Why you need all three steps

Typically, most of the time and effort is devoted to the second step, and it’s not uncommon for organisations to skip the first or forget the last.

Unfortunately, doing so can widen the knowing-doing gap because it’s the combination of all three steps that connects individual needs with organisational objectives, ensuring that leaders know what to do and are able and enabled to do it.

Failing to join the dots overlooks the fact that leadership doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it occurs within an organisational system that defines roles, responsibilities, and relationships, and these, in turn, influence mindsets and behaviours.

So, what happens when you skip the first step?

A common reason for skipping the first step is the belief that “something is better than nothing.” Often, those responsible for delivering leadership development in their organisations have worked long and hard to make a case for the investment, and when the green light is given, they are understandably keen to get early runs on the board by getting a leadership development program up and running.

This means they can be reluctant to take a step back to first define the leadership behaviours needed for organisational success, even though it means going (a little) slower at first to go further later.

Nevertheless, this first step is crucial because inspiring or holding someone to a leadership standard that’s never been articulated is hard.

A leadership framework will help get everyone on the same page about what it means to be a leader in your organisation, generating focus and alignment by cutting through the noise and reinforcing what is most important (100,000+ leadership books on Amazon, anyone?).

It’s also essential for positively shaping your leadership culture by informing important leadership decisions (i.e., how and who you attract, identify, select, manage, develop, promote, reward, and exit).

So, what happens when you skip the last step?

As Kevin Kruse, writing for Forbes, has said, “Very little thought and support are given to what happens back on the job; not a lot of effort or tracking is put into the “pull-through” elements, the application elements, of skill development. It’s no wonder the dreaded “knowing-doing” gap continues to plague [the learning] industry.”

This statement rings true because acquiring new knowledge is relatively easy; applying it is much harder, and without a follow-up plan that provides structure, support, and accountability, leaders will likely fall back to their old habits and routines, particularly when under pressure.

Three elements that I consistently find effective in shaping and reinforcing behaviour change include enrolling senior leaders in sponsoring the development of other leaders, incorporating group coaching to leverage peer-to-peer learning, and including on-the-job application activities to help leaders put their skills to work with their teams straight away.

Regardless of the specifics of your enablement strategy, it’s ultimately about not leaving behaviour change to chance.

As Ken Blanchard, Paul Meyer, and Dick Ruhe, in their book “Know Can Do! Put Yor Know-How into Action,” suggest, “We need to spend ten times the amount of time following up our training as we do organising, developing, and delivering it.”

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If leadership development within your organisation is not producing the desired results, consider whether missing one of these steps could be a contributing factor. I’ll wager that the impact of leadership development will increase when you connect all three steps – Define, Develop, and Do.