[Holacracy] is the first really second-tier technology that was created from a third-tier holding space. It is radical if adopted and not easy to facilitate. Also takes away the ego and biases of all attending. If done well, fantastically much gets done in meetings, in the organization, and [...] in an iterative fashion.
The Limits of Leadership Development
May 10, 2010 - 3:31pm
There are so many consultants and change agents today trying to transform organizations through leadership development initiatives. If only we can get a significant minority of leaders to realize a new level of developmental capacity, surely that will lead to an organization capable of transcending its current challenges... right?
Well, maybe. Though more often than not, when I talk with my colleagues doing leadership development work, they express a frustration that, while the work has a positive impact, especially on the individuals, true organizational transformations through leadership development are limited or non-existent. As a friend of mine said about going through leadership development programs early in his career: no amount of transformational experiences out on the ropes courses or in a retreat setting, however powerful, changed the fact that the team then went back into the same old context, with the same processes, power structures, and patterns at play – and the transformation efforts soon atrophied.
Even when leadership development programs succeed in catalyzing vertical development for participants, those leaders often face significant developmental “drag”. Their organizational context limits their new capacity or even pulls them backwards, so their own developmental shift is difficult to sustain individually and nearly impossible to spread organizationally. It’s a terribly frustrating situation, both for the individual who now sees this system more clearly, and for the leadership development professionals whose impact is limited by the broader systems and patterns at play in the organization.
So what is the committed leadership development professional to do? To really catalyze a whole-system transformation they’ll need to broaden from just developing leaders to developing the concrete organizational system itself. In other words, they’ll need to upgrade the way power and authority formally get defined, the way decisions get made, the way meetings happen, the way the organization is structured, and the processes used to define and execute day-to-day work. Thus they’ll effectively need to install a new organizational operating system, one which manifests new capacities organizationally, even if a majority of the individual leaders within haven’t yet made the leap to the new mindset behind them.
From a leadership development perspective, here’s the ultimate irony of this approach: With a new “operating system” installed, one which itself embeds a developmental leap, the pressing need for individual leadership development is significantly decreased, yet its potential impact is far greater. Instead of well-developed leaders being constrained by the system and struggling to effect change despite it, now they have an organizational container that both embraces and reinforces their deepest capacities. With such a system in place, leadership development has a new and even more powerful role to play in helping the organization move forward.
And I think getting there will require a shift for many leadership development professionals as well. For me, it took facing and releasing my own attachments to other people’s development, so I could step back and focus on developing systems that “baked-in” advanced capacities while embracing people exactly where they already were – which ironically increased my capacity to facilitate development in others when appropriate. For a colleague of mine, it meant broadening his service offerings and associated skills beyond training and coaching to include full-scale organizational consulting. Whatever the challenge, for leadership development professionals who choose to make this leap, the transformation will start with themselves – and transformation is rarely an easy or comfortable process, even for those in the business of catalyzing it.
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Comments
May 11 2010 - 4:45amMagnus Ström writes:
I was just listening to your presentation from H1 homepage while writing on some ideas on leadership and L training. I totally agree with you (and Evan) and at the same time I´m not sure how to go ahead. I work with leadership development in sweden mostly in humans service org and they are a long way from a new way of organizing (a bit in to lean at the best). My aim right now is primarily to train them in developing their leadership integrated in everyday work, to make them focus on what works and do what they say they want to do and more importantly what their co-workers need them to do from a leadership point of view. But my idea is also to connect with this new ideas about organizing, like H1 and Hamels writing. But at the same time the HSO are far away from that. So surely they need a new operating system, but at the same time it´s a big leap and there is much need for ledarship development today thats actually improving behavior that helps a long the way.
Hmm. Don´t know if my english is good enough for this. I like your post Brian and at the same time I think there is a way to improve everyday leadership right now and push things i bit further a long the way towards your ideas - even if in my case the organizations have a lot to do before they enter the new world of work. Looking forward to know more about your work!
May 19 2010 - 9:53pmJulia writes:
I wonder what would frame a creative "followership dynamic" ? I'm appreciating that more lately....
May 24 2010 - 11:02amGary Smith writes:
Leadership in the context we most often use it is exclusively a top down construct. The leader changes, imporves, gains knowledge and then that is dispensed donward througout the comgpany. I think we've found that doesn't work no matter how suble the approach.
I've am much more interested in an area I've been exploring that relies on the embedded wisdom of the organization itself. It's a bit of a cross between Margaret Wheatly's organizations as enties and Paul Hawkin's planitary immune system from "Blessed Unrest"
It's actually based on a combination of a specific acting technique contextualized through an experience in healing with a local alternative doctor looking at activating healing from a collective cellular level.
Gary
May 31 2010 - 8:23pmOlivier Compagne writes:
Interesting post and I appreciate the quality of the comments.There are many ways to do leadership development, and by reading your article I am wondering: "what does he mean by vertical development?" Would you mind giving your definition in the comments? Thanks!
Jun 8 2010 - 6:58pmBrian Robertson writes:
Hi Olivier - I'm using the distinction of "vertical development" to refer to the kind of development that is transformational rather than expansive, and thus allows meaning-making from within a larger space, with more perspective-taking capacity and thus more choices available, as opposed to "horizontal development" about expanding knowledge, skills, etc. from within the same frame and same mode of meaning-making.
In particular, I find the ego-development model taught by Susanne Cook-Greuter and others particularly useful as a model of vertical development - see this article for an introductory overview. The book "Leadership Agility" is also great, and applies ego development theory to the business world. This is probably a topic worthy of its own blog post - perhaps I'll add one in the future!
Regards,
- Brian
Feb 2 2011 - 10:50amMaureen Metcalf writes:
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your post. I enjoyed reading your post and the comments. We(Metcalf & Associates) are finding the same dynamic in our business as you are. My initial business focus was organizational transformation and I moved toward including leadership development when I came to the realization that or change did not stick without leadership change. We now call our offering Leader Innovation. All of our work is based in Ken's integral theory so we help leaders develop in the context of the organization and concurrently - they change in response to the organizational needs. It is a sort of co-evolution.
Your holacracy model is the most comprehensive organizational model we have seen and I look forward to finding a client organization that is ready and able to fully implement it. We have skirted the edges for some time now. In my small experiments in my own company, we find it invaluable.
Regards,Maureen
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About the Author
Brian Robertson
Brian is an experienced entrepreneur, CEO, and organizational pioneer. His work with Holacracy™ has found international support within both the conventional business world and cutting-edge movements and thought-leaders.
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At the recent Organization Design Forum conference, Bill Posner from the Center for Creative Leadership made a point about leadership development that stuck with me. He basically said that today's leaders need to recognize that they do not have the capacity to create tomorrow's organizations, and that instead of teaching new leaders their methods, they should open up the organization itself to be formed by the next generation of leaders.
He went on to say, that the paradigm of developing leaders by removing them from their context (ropes course, etc..) does not work, and that the next generation of leaders and organizations must be co-developed at the same time.
This really struck me as true because there are two fundamental road blocks
1) Today's leaders who do not have the capacity to recognize high order organizational forms and thus block them from coming into existence in their organization
2) Highly developed leaders who can't function in an existing organization of today.
These two things must be developed simultaneously for either to be successful.