Leadership Development
Over the years, I’ve worked with many organizations that have invested heavily in leadership development.
They’ve sent managers to leadership programs, brought in big name speakers and trainers, provided pricey coaching, thrown in some fancy new competencies, and given leaders tools to communicate better, deal with conflict, support employees, and lead through change.
And yet, when I am brought in and I talk with employees, I sometimes hear things that don’t quite fit with all that investment.
“It depends on which manager you have.”
That one comment tells you a lot, and it’s not what you’d want to hear if you’d paid a small fortune for leadership development.
One department communicates openly, while another seems to operate like everything is a secret. One manager deals with performance issues quickly, while another lets them drag on for months. One team is encouraged to raise concerns and challenge ideas, while in another department they have learned that it’s easier to keep their heads down.
The organization may have some very good leaders.
But it may also have a big problem with how leadership works across the entire company.
When Good Leaders Are Working in an Inconsistent Internal System
Leadership development usually focuses on the individual leader. We teach leaders how to have better conversations, give feedback, coach employees, handle conflict, build trust, lead through change, and hold people accountable.
And don’t get me wrong, that’s all valuable. But eventually I think organizations need to ask a different question.
Are we developing individual leaders, or are we also developing how leadership works across our organization?
Those two questions aren’t quite the same thing. A skilled manager can create a healthy, engaged team within an organization that has significant cultural problems. I’ve seen it happen many times. Employees describe their manager as the reason they stay.
Unfortunately, the opposite happens too. A strong company culture can be undermined by a manager whose behaviour doesn’t reflect what the organization says it values.
In both cases, way too much still depends on the individual leader.
As organizations grow, that becomes an increasingly tricky problem to sort out. New managers come in, experienced leaders leave, teams expand, departments merge and then get pulled apart again, and new priorities just keep popping up. The informal ways of doing things that once worked don’t necessarily work well anymore. And before long, employees can be having very different experiences of the same organization depending on the department that they are in.
Employees Experience Leadership as a System
Most employees don’t separate leadership into neat little boxes.
They experience whether expectations are clear. Whether their manager follows through on what they say. Whether someone listens when they raise a concern. Whether priorities make sense. Whether the rules seem to apply equally or not. Whether leaders acknowledge the pressure people are under. Whether they hear about changes early enough to understand what is happening.
All of those experiences shape what employees eventually come to believe about leadership in the organization.
And those beliefs are usually based far more on what happens over and over than on what appears in a leadership competency model.
Which is why I’m increasingly looking at leadership as a system.
A leadership system means there’s enough shared understanding that leaders don’t have to handle every situation identically, but employees aren’t left wondering which version of the organization they’re going to encounter today.
There’s a clear consistency to how leadership happens.
Where the Cracks Tend to Show Up
Communication is often one of the first places I notice a problem. Senior leaders may believe they’ve communicated something clearly, but then the message changes as it moves through the organization. One manager provides some useful context and invites questions. Another forwards the email. Another waits until someone asks.
Accountability is another area that I look at. Most organizations have expectations around behaviour and performance. The real test comes when someone doesn’t meet those expectations, especially when that person is highly skilled, really high up the food chain, hard to replace, or simply hard to deal with. Employees notice when those exceptions happen.
Change exposes gaps quickly too. When people are going through uncertainty, they tend to pay closer attention to what’s happening with leadership. They notice who’s communicating, who’s hiding, who acknowledges what people are going through and whether leaders seem to be on the same page.
Then there is engagement. When one department is thriving while another struggles with morale, turnover, conflict, or burnout, we might assume we have an employee engagement problem. But if people are working within the same organization, under the same policies and benefits, we’ve probably got a leadership issue on our hands. The differences between departments often tell us a lot.
Leadership Development Still Matters
None of this means we should stop investing in individual leaders.
Actually, quite the opposite.
Good leadership systems still depend on leaders having the confidence and skills to have difficult conversations, communicate clearly, navigate uncertainty, support their people, make sound decisions, and follow through.
But training someone to have a difficult conversation doesn’t help much if the whole organization is adept at dodging difficult issues all of the time.
Teaching leaders to involve their team in change has limited impact if major decisions are consistently made without considering the context.
Talking about sustainable performance means nothing if every new priority simply gets added to the existing workload.
And asking managers to build engagement becomes frustrating when other parts of the organization are making it harder for employees to do their best work.
At some point, leadership development has to move beyond what individual leaders know how to do and start thinking seriously about what the organization consistently supports, reinforces, expects, and allows.
A New Way To Look At Leadership
As I’ve developed the WorkSmartLiveSmart Leadership System™, I’m looking very closely at the conditions that actually shape how leadership is lived out across an organization.
Six areas continually intersect:
Culture. Communication. Humanizing Change. Adaptability & Sustainable Performance. Engagement Conditions. Accountability & Follow-Through.
None of them work independently.
When communication is unclear, accountability becomes harder. When accountability is inconsistent, culture suffers. When people get blindsided by change, they’ll naturally resist it and get frustrated. When workloads remain unreasonable for too long, asking people to adapt just starts to feel like you’re expecting them to suck it up.
A weakness in one area often shows up somewhere else.
That’s one reason leadership problems can be surprisingly difficult to diagnose. The problem you see may not be where the problem starts.
Before You Invest in the Next Leadership Solution
If you’re a member of a senior leadership team, run your own business, or are responsible for leadership and culture within your company, you might want to take a step back before deciding what your leaders need next.
Don’t just focus on individual managers – take a closer look at whats happening across the whole organization.
Where is leadership remarkably consistent?
Where does the employee experience change depending on the department or leader?
What expectations are universally understood?
Where do different people have different interpretations of the same thing?
And where are good leaders having to compensate for organizational practices that make their jobs harder than they need to be?
Those questions led me to create the WorkSmartLiveSmart Leadership System™ Executive Scorecard.
It’s designed for executives, senior leadership teams, HR leaders, business owners, and boards who want to look beyond individual leadership skills and assess the broader system influencing how leadership happens in their organization.
The Scorecard examines the six interconnected leadership capabilities and helps you identify where your organization is strong, where inconsistency may be getting in the way, and where leadership attention could have the greatest impact.
You may discover that the next step is leadership training.
You may discover that it isn’t.
Either way, that’s useful to know before you make the investment.
If you want to dive in…
Download the WorkSmartLiveSmart Leadership System™ Executive Scorecard and take a closer look at how leadership is actually working across your organization.
https://worksmartlivesmart.com/leadership-executive-scorecard/
If you have some strategies to share – comment on this posting!
Additional Postings:
The Power of Values: Building a Positive and Productive Workplace Culture
Building a Culture of Gratitude: The Leadership Advantage That Transforms Teams
Creating an Inclusive and Trusting Culture: Essential Strategies for Effective Leadership
Psychological Safety Is Not a Program: It Is the Result of Healthy Workplace Conditions
Celebrations And Social Gatherings Are An Important Part Of Workplace Culture
Recognition That Boosts Workplace Culture
Breaking the Blame Cycle: Building a Workplace Culture that Embraces Responsibility
Positive Leaders Connect Before They Correct: Why Relationships Make Feedback Work
Embracing the 9 Key Behaviours of Exceptional Leaders
What Is Adaptability Quotient (AQ)? A Leadership System for Navigating Change
Effective Communication For Leadership Success
What Is the S-O-S Resilience Principle ™ – A Practical System for Managing Stress in Real Time
7 Reality Anchors™ for Dealing With Difficult People
Dealing With Difficult People At Work: A Leader’s Guide to Toxic Behaviour and Conflict
Frequently Asked Questions About Leadership Development
What is a leadership system?
A leadership system is the shared expectations, behaviours, practices, and processes that shape how leadership happens across an organization. It creates greater consistency in how leaders communicate, make decisions, navigate change, support employees, and reinforce accountability.
Why doesn’t leadership training always improve leadership effectiveness?
Leadership training can strengthen individual skills, but those skills can be difficult to apply when organizational practices don’t support them. Sustainable improvement requires both capable leaders and workplace systems that reinforce the behaviours leaders are being asked to demonstrate.
How can you tell if you have a leadership development problem or a leadership system problem?
Look for patterns across the organization. If communication, accountability, engagement, or the employee experience varies significantly between departments or managers, the issue may extend beyond the capabilities of individual leaders.
How do you assess the effectiveness of your leadership system?
Look at how consistently leadership practices are experienced across the organization rather than relying only on policies or individual examples. The WorkSmartLiveSmart Leadership System™ Executive Scorecard assesses six interconnected areas: Culture, Communication, Humanizing Change, Adaptability & Sustainable Performance, Engagement Conditions, and Accountability & Follow-Through.