How To Get ROI On Your Leadership Development Programme
Leadership development is one of the biggest investments organisations make in their people. Yet despite this investment, many organisations still struggle to develop the leadership capability needed to inspire people, drive change and create organisations that can adapt and perform over the long run.
Perhaps we must raise the question of whether we've been developing the right thing, in the right way. You see, not all leadership development is equal.
In fact, despite leadership being one of the most researched topics in organisational life, there is remarkably little agreement on what it really means.
Ask ten people to define leadership and you'll probably get ten different answers.
As Warren Bennis famously observed:
"Leadership is the most studied and least understood topic in the social sciences."
The First Problem: Leadership Is Not a Job Title Assigned To A Few
For decades, leadership has been treated as a person, a role or a title. We promote people into leadership positions, identify future leaders and build programmes for senior leaders, as though leadership is something someone permanently becomes.
At Holos, from our decades of experience developing leadership capability in some of the most forward thinking organisations, we've come to a different conclusion:
Leadership isn't a person. Or a job title. It’s a skill. A dynamic one. One that anyone, anywhere in the organisation can and should have.
Our definition is this:
Leadership is the practice and art of bringing something new into existence by inspiring and engaging others to participate. It is the capability to create change.
If there are people involved but there is no change, it is not leadership. In fact, leadership is just one of three skills we need all people in an organisation to be skilled at:
Leadership: The skill of creating change by inspiring others to follow.
Management: The skill of keeping things reliable by supporting others to use suitable processes and routines effectively.
Followership: The skill of seeing someone else doing something great and following, supporting, and enabling them.
Leadership is something people practice whenever the situation calls for it. The highest-performing organisations create cultures where people can move fluidly between all three skills, depending on what the situation requires.
What this looks like in practice
Imagine a junior member of the team identifies a better way of working.
In many organisations, leadership is assumed to belong to those with formal authority. The junior team member may or may not share the idea with someone with more authority, depending on how empowered they feel.
The junior employee waits for a response. The manager continues managing multiple competing priorities with little available time or headspace. The organisation carries on doing what it has always done.
In organisations that see leadership as a shared dynamic capability, something very different happens.
The individual steps forward because they feel allowed to take personal ownership and that they have the skills to create change.
The cultural conditions of psychological safety enable them to feel safe enough to take small experiments.
Colleagues choose to follow because they see the value of the idea and operate from a place of interdependence.
The manager doesn't feel threatened. Instead, they practice leadership themselves by sharing what they know, connecting to the greater purpose and mission of the team and organisation whilst creating the conditions for someone else's leadership to emerge.
Leadership, management and followership are all present. No one is confined to a role. Everyone contributes according to the needs of the situation. The organisation moves forward.
Three assumptions are limiting leadership development
Leadership development is for senior executives
The first is who we develop.
Many organisations concentrate leadership development on a relatively small group of senior people, despite the fact that opportunities to lead exist every day, at every level of the organisation.
A graduate who spots a better way of working. A project coordinator who brings people together around an idea. A mid level manager with a product development idea.
None of these people need a leadership title to demonstrate leadership.
2. Leadership skills are the same as management skills
The second is what we develop.
Much of what is labelled as leadership development is actually management development.
Participants learn how to improve planning, prioritisation, governance, delegation, operational performance and execution. These are essential capabilities - but they are management capabilities.
Management creates reliability. Leadership creates change.
Organisations need both. The problem is confusing one for the other and only giving the right to lead to the small group of people at the top.
3. People are developed through head knowledge alone
And finally, is how we develop it.
True leadership development is not just about transferring head knowledge. How many times have your people sat through presentations on how to be a better leader? Do they really move the needle?
Authentic leadership requires small yet transformational tweaks of being and doing. That requires both horizontal development (building new skills and knowledge) and vertical development (expanding the way people make sense of themselves, others and the world around them). In other words, development first from the inside out that positively impacts all their outer actions, reactions and interactions.
This level of development requires an approach that combines experiential heat experiences, in the moment coaching, expert diagnostic, measurement and continuous reflection.
What’s more, it must be rooted in context. Leadership is always exercised within a specific team, organisation, culture and industry. We don't lead in a vacuum, so we shouldn't develop leadership in one either. All leadership development should be anchored by immediate, practical implementation in their day-to-day real world. They are the agents of immediate, practical, performance-enhancing change.
Where To From Here
If leadership is something only senior people do, organisations will always limit their capacity for change.
Every day, opportunities to lead emerge across every level of an organisation. New ideas surface. Problems are spotted. Better ways of working are discovered. The question is not whether those opportunities exist, but whether people feel equipped, empowered and supported to do something with them.
The organisations that will thrive in an increasingly uncertain world won't simply invest in developing better leaders at the top. They'll develop leadership as an organisational capability. Even a team capability too.
That means enabling people at every level to know when and how to lead, manage and follow. It means creating a culture where leadership is recognised, encouraged and shared, rather than protected by a select few. And it means developing people not just through knowledge alone, but through the experiences, coaching, challenge and reflection that fundamentally change how they think, relate and act. Ultimately, creating new habits of showing up.
The more people in your organisation who are capable of practising these dynamic skills, the greater your organisation's capacity to adapt, innovate and create change. That’s how you get ROI on your investment.
On a separate but related note, if you’re looking to estimate the commercial return of your leadership intervention, you can use our handy ROI calculator here: https://holoschange.com/roi-calculator
Authors: Angela Dellar and Neil Crofts