Three questions to ask before you fund leadership development
As a Business head, you approve a budget for leadership development, and the request goes to HR and L&D to work up.
What comes back is a calendar. Three programmes, two levels, a vendor shortlist, cost per head, dates that avoid quarter close.
Nobody made a mistake. L&D collected needs, HR proposed names, procurement compared days and cost per head, and somebody checked who else had run it.
The execution starts, the calendar runs. People attend, rate it well, and go back to the jobs they had before. But nothing changes in your leadership capability.
You also do not get intelligence around what is really challenging your next rung or Which capability is thin across a whole layer.
So next year’s funding decision gets made on impressions about individuals rather than evidence about the business, and the spend repeats while the capability does not accumulate.
Three questions that can improve outcomes are:
Am I buying a skill or building a capability?
A skill is a specific, learned ability to perform a single task.
A capability is a broader, strategic combination of multiple skills, behaviours, processes and tools working together to drive a larger outcome. Leinwand and Mainardi, The Essential Advantage.
Nobody sells you a business capability as a whole. You buy the part you cannot build yourself, and you supply the part nobody can sell you.
The part you can buy is the leadership component: The judgement, the method and the practice that let a whole layer operate that capability that are separate from just skills.
What you supply are Process, decision rights, incentives
and culture.
Is one party accountable for the intervention, or am I assembling that myself?
The market is built in components. Assessment firms define what good looks like and leave the build to someone else, coaching providers take the target as given, and content providers have no view on what changed afterwards.
Buy two or three of those and you have become the integrator, which is why nobody can be held to the outcome.
The success of the leadership intervention depends on who owns the total outcome not just the parts.
What will I know about this layer at the end that I do not know now
Twelve months of a cohort working on real problems is the best diagnostic your organisation will ever get, and in most engagements it is thrown away.
What you should expect is the themes that layer found hardest, in aggregate. That tells you where to put the next investment, and what your own system keeps doing to its leaders.
The same question has a wrong answer in coaching, and it is the more flattering one. A provider who offers to report what an individual leader said in a coaching conversation is offering access the coaching itself cannot survive, because nobody takes a real problem to a coach who reports upward. What separates the two answers is the reporting rule. The minimum cohort size a provider will report on, and what they will never report, written down before the engagement starts rather than asked for afterwards.
That also raises the question of what to stop?
Asking whether your leaders will like it, and judging it afterwards on satisfaction scores.
Naming the intervention before naming the outcome.
Making it a one time offsite.
The budget will be spent either way. What the three questions decide is whether the business ends the year with a capability it did not have, or with a calendar it has already run once.
Written by: Priya Venkatesan, Founder & Partner, Ālokana.
About Ālokana
Ālokana is an executive coaching, training and advisory firm.
We build leadership capability at three levels: future proofing the organisation, with CXOs and top teams (Atlas); choosing the bets worth making, with business heads (Apex); and execution through high performance teams, with senior managers (Ascent).
