Dr. David Day - Advances in Leader Development
January 2014
|
|
|
In this podcast we speak with acclaimed leadership researcher and expert, Dr. David Day. If your organization is looking for more effective ways of developing leaders, here are some innovative ideas based on the most recent evidence. Dr. Day weighs in on recent fads that claim to draw from the neuroscience of leadership and points to more promising areas that help prepare leaders to operate under increasing uncertainty.
Dr. David V. Day is Winthrop Professor and Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management at The University of Western Australia Business School. Dr. Day's core research are in the areas of leadership and leadership development. He is the lead author on An Integrative Approach to Leader Development (Routledge, 2009) and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Leadership and Organizations (Oxford University Press, 2014). He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology and as a Consulting Editor for several other scholarly journals. Dr. Day is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He works with various organizations around the world on projects related to leadership and leadership development. Dr. Day was awarded the 2010 Walter F. Ulmer Research Award from the Center for Creative Leadership (USA) for outstanding, career-long contributions to applied leadership research.
Dr. David V. Day is Winthrop Professor and Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management at The University of Western Australia Business School. Dr. Day's core research are in the areas of leadership and leadership development. He is the lead author on An Integrative Approach to Leader Development (Routledge, 2009) and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Leadership and Organizations (Oxford University Press, 2014). He serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Psychology and as a Consulting Editor for several other scholarly journals. Dr. Day is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He works with various organizations around the world on projects related to leadership and leadership development. Dr. Day was awarded the 2010 Walter F. Ulmer Research Award from the Center for Creative Leadership (USA) for outstanding, career-long contributions to applied leadership research.
Edited Transcript
Hello and welcome to Human Capital Growth’s podcast on talent management where we bring you the best in science and practice to inform your HR decisions. Today’s conversation is on leadership development. Our guest today is Dr. David Day, Winthrop Professor and Woodside Chair in Leadership and Management at The University of Western Australia's Business School. He is the lead author on the book 'An Integrative Approach to Leader Development' and he is also the editor of 'The Oxford Handbook of Leadership and Organizations'. In 2010, Dr. Day was awarded the Walter Ulmer Research Award from the Center for Creative Leadership. David also consults with corporations and governmental entities around the world on matters related to leadership. David is speaking to us today via Skype from Perth Australia.
SSB: Welcome David.
DD: Good day Shreya. Nice to talk with you.
SSB: Good day to you. It has been five years since you were on my SIOP panel on succession planning and we have met a couple times since then. It is so good to have you back for a conversation.
DD: Thank you. I am looking forward to it.
SSB: Before we get started, David, talk to us a little bit about some of your current research projects. What are the exciting things that you are finding?
DD: I'm really interested in longitudinal models of leader development, looking at how people change over time and in particular charting and understanding personal trajectories of development. That is personal trajectories of change and as a leader overtime. I'm also interested in extending this into more collective forms of leadership around leadership capacity so developing individuals is one thing but then developing collective leadership capacity. I think this is really where most organizations want to go. We are in the very early days in terms of the research around this but using tools such as social network analysis offer some really keen insights into developing not only individuals but this notion of a collective leadership capacity.
SSB: That's really fascinating David. As we move into a world of greater volatility I think the demands on leadership is just expanding it's not just one person's capability that's important but really it's the team's effort that's going to make a difference. So I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more about what you have. I just pulled out this statistics and I wanted to get your opinion. Last year the Economist group ran a survey with CEOs from around the world and they found that 43% of them believe that there is insufficient leadership talent to execute on their strategies. What's the real issue here? Are we missing on our ability to grow good leaders or do we simply not understand leadership effectiveness.
DD: If I had the answer to that one Shreya, that would be kind of the Holy Grail of helping organizations master their leadership development challenges but it's a complex, if not a wicked problem for organizations because it's dealing with this notion of development. It's dealing with this notion of what some would calls more soft kinds of skills rather than technical skills. Ron Heifetz talks about adaptive challenges verses technical challenges and a lot of the leaders who rise through the ranks have been doing so based on their skills to solve technical challenges. What's really needed at top levels are people who can not only engage in helping to solve the adaptive challenges but engage with others to do so. So this notion of having an insufficient leadership talent, I think it's due to many possible factors - one of which being this focus on technical verses adaptive challenges. Another one is in terms of not looking broadly enough for leadership potential within an organization. I think it was John Gardner who said that most people go through their lives using only a small fraction of their potential and one of these potentials is leadership potential. So why is it that some people have never considered leading. These are untapped resources that exists in every organization. So helping to facilitate that potential and to grow that potential would help go a long way towards addressing this leadership crisis.
SSB: That’s interesting, David. You said it's a question of identifying leadership talent. So let's go back to the age-old question, can everybody be a leader?
DD: I think so! Everybody can be a leader but everybody can not be THE leader if you get my drift, right? I get frustrated when people say "well, if everybody's a leader then who's going to follow". You know 'too many cooks spoil the broth' kind of a thing. I think this misses the point massively because leadership is not a position it's a process and it's a dynamic process that can involve a wide array of individuals. So while somebody may be the leader at a particular point of time someone else around the table could be the leader just a few moments later depending on who's exercising social influence and who's providing expertise. I think everyone can be developed to be a more effective leader and we need more effective leaders at all levels of organizations that doesn't mean everybody's going to be the CEO. It just means that people should embrace this responsibility to engage in leadership when it's needed.
SSB: So where should organizations be placing their efforts? Is it to grow just a few high potentials or grow leaders across the board?
DD: That's an excellent question. I'll I think most organizations take this high-potential leadership approach which has some underlying assumptions to it, which is that, leadership is somewhat of an exclusive process that only some people have a right to participate in. I mean that may not be the message that comes across explicitly but I think implicitly when you have a high potential kind of focus with your development that is the implicit message that leadership is not for everybody it's for only those special chosen ones. That's an unfortunate message. Having said that I realize that resources are tight in organizations and trying to invest in everybody's potential may not be possible given limited resources. So I think there's ways we need to rethink how we do development and one of them is to look at it as a 24/7 ongoing process rather than an investment in indifferent experiences or programs or so forth.
SSB: That's a really great idea, David, a 24/7 ongoing process. Now, I know that my counterparts in organizations are just going to flip hearing that. They are already stretched to the brim trying to grow their high potentials and you are saying make it 24/7. So tell us more.
DD: You know the technology is changing so quickly. There are resources that are now available that weren't available even just a few years ago in terms of being able to have ongoing feedback and ongoing assessments, that don't require taking people away from their work in order to develop. It's using their work in their experience to accelerate their development. So leveraging this technology is one way to do this. Another way is to embrace this more fully. I think it has to be something that transcends an HR Department. If development is only in the preview of HR it's never really going to be fully embraced in an organization. So we've got to somehow get the message across to line managers to support this 24/7 notion of leadership development.
SSB: That’s really interesting and it also converges with what a lot of senior leaders are saying about leadership development. I just read this interview in the McKinsey Quarterly about growing leaders in India, which you know is a topic dear to my heart given the huge potential there. What they were talking about is that leadership development cannot be just HR's responsibility and but they also said something interesting, which is, throw your leaders into the deep end and see who can swim. Is that a good strategy?
DD: Only if you want to invest in surf 'n 'life rescue. This raises an excellent point and it's tied into some fairly recent research to an article by Derue and Wellman in 2009 in the journal Applied Psychology. It's one of the first articles I accepted as an associate editor at JAP. I was looking at developmental challenges and the thinking of the researchers was that - there are challenges that are too extreme, almost an inverted U kind of shape. [What this means is] that [when] the challenge becomes too much of a stretch assignment it actually does more harm than it does good. [Although] they didn't find an inverted U, they did find a kind of plateau of a return on investment for developmental challenge. Once it got to be too high, except if the person had readily available access to feedback then that challenge didn't plateau, it continued to help with their development. So just throwing people off the deep end without support mechanisms is just a horrible idea and it really is putting people in over their heads in a way that makes people frustrated and almost a learned helplessness in terms of leadership development. But the good news is if we can build in high quality support then even really extreme challenges like throwing people into the deep end may actually help as long as there is a life preserver to be thrown to them.
SSB: And that’s really interesting. So going back to the original question - can everybody be leaders, my question to you again is can everyone overcome the plateau should they get access to feedback or are there individual differences [in one's ability to develop]?
DD: Well I'm a firm believer in individual differences and I think that there are some people who by virtue of what they were given through genetics and other things are just better suited to be leaders. They probably don't need as much investment in their development to really thrive as developing leaders. So for those people what those particular potentialities are is still a bit of a question. But certain people are more likely to thrive under extreme challenges than others for sure. To help others who struggle - one route maybe in terms of introducing more support mechanisms and feedback is one of those.
SSB: Let's talk about feedback. What kind of feedback is most beneficial? Is it specific to the task at hand? Or is it about the strategy and who they are as individuals? What is the research saying?
DD: The research is saying that not all feedback is created equal, and that as much as a third of feedback programs or feedback interventions have the opposite effect of what they intend. That is, they have a harmful effect on performance and development. So there are better ways to provide feedback and having it presented in a more objective and timely fashion is one way to do this. I'm a big fan of what the Center for Creative Leadership uses in their programs around what they call the SPI model of feedback, which stands for Situation Behavior Impact. It's a way of helping to make feedback more personal, more objective, and to lower the defensiveness of the recipient. [In this type of], feedback you talk about a situation in which you were in with somebody, the behavior that this person engaged in, and the impact that behavior had on you, not the organization as a whole, not everybody in the universe, what was the impact on you. When you frame it that way people are less likely to become defensive about it because they can't disavow the impact it had on you. They might disavow the impact it had on third party people but they can't disavow the impact it had on you. So learning to do this is pretty easy but implementing it on a daily basis proves to be a bit more difficult. We just struggle with providing good quality feedback to people and as a result we are cheating people of their learning. So another piece of this in terms of feedback - one of the natural reactions when people talk about feedback and can you give me some feedback it's like "oh no it's going to be negative...oh no it's going to be critical". An important point I think is that we miss the opportunities to provide positive feedback to people and the positive feedback is really a way of reinforcing what is being done right and just basic reinforcement principles. Learning principles would suggest that reinforcing positive behavior with positive feedback is a way of getting people to repeat that. But again, we seem to be very reluctant to do that perhaps because we think that people will then slack off or start taking advantage of us. But the research doesn't support that all. It actually supports the point that if you give people positive feedback they will tend to repeat the behavior that was reinforced.
SSB: Interesting David. Some of my clients [might] ask - is that culturally specific or universal. Do you have any information on that?
DD: Well sure. I think that we know a bit about cultural norms and one of the norms that is very important in certain cultures, Asian cultures is one of them-is this notion of power distance. So providing feedback to someone who is in a position above oneself probably would not be well-received. In certain cultures, unless there was a culture of feedback within the organization, even if this organization is situated in a cultural context were high power distance is the norm.
SSB: Very interesting. Certainly that could take up an entire podcast. We need to have you back, David. But moving to our next point about individual differences, what kinds of things are you seeing as being most predictive of leadership effectiveness?
DD: The things that are predictive of leadership effectiveness and by the way let me just go on a bit of tangent here about effectiveness because effectiveness is a pretty big construct. What is effectiveness? We tend to think more in terms of an outcome. [that is] the performance of an individual or the performance of an organization. But I think effectiveness also incorporates process issues that we tend to overlook. So in terms of leadership effectiveness it may not be just the outcome of that leadership that results in certain performance changes. It's the process by which those changes occur and we need to focus more on those process kinds of issues. Having said that - what are the kinds of things that predict leadership effectiveness, leadership performance and I think it comes back to what do we know about individual differences and what can we measure well. I think the answers to that are cognitive ability and also personality. We know from the research that those two things are highly related to leadership emergence and to some extent leadership effectiveness, which are two different things. By the way, there are no doubt many other potential construct out there that can predict leadership effectiveness up but we need to figure out how to measure them more appropriately. Some of the work that Dr. Matt Barney had been doing at Infosys and now doing as part of his company at Leaderamp is using Rasch measurement modeling to look at some of these other constructs and to measure them very rigorously. I'm really optimistic that this is going to open a treasure chest of other individual different measures that can protect leadership effectiveness.
SSB: That's wonderful David and I know Matt and you have been talking a lot about those measures. Can give us some insights on what types of things you are looking at?
DD: One of the things I've been working on in conjunction with a PhD student here at the University Western Australia is this construct of developmental readiness - is somebody ready to take on a developmental challenge. We tend to assume that everybody is, or based on other kinds of subjective squishy assessments we assume okay this person is ready to take on a global assignment somewhere those are pretty big structure assignment. If we had some measures that could assess the readiness of an individual to take on a developmental stretch assignment, I think that could help maximize the potential in that assignment for leadership development.
SSB: It's very interesting and also very practical and relevant. I want to go back again to something else you said earlier - the difference between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. I know that in the business world there's a lot of focus on leadership effectiveness. There's also an assumption that people know how to pick leaders. Is leadership emergence about who has the potential to become a leader?
DD: Leadership emergence goes to this notion of perceptions- who is seen as a leader in a particular context. Some may say, well that's really not what we're interested in, we really interested in who's going to be effective. I think that those two things are not the same thing but they do interrelate and here's how. If you are seen as a leader you are much more likely to be able to influence someone than if you are not seen as a leader. And if social influences a core to leadership, as many approaches would argue, then being seen as a leader makes it easier or facilitates being effective as a leader. If you're not seen as a leader you may still be effective but it's going to be more difficult.
SSB: I think this has huge implications for people who are ambitious and who want to be leaders. Do you have any guidance particularly for women who tend to hit the glass ceiling much earlier in their careers. What can they do to be seen as leaders?
DD: Boy, I wish I had the answer to that because it's a problem that crosses pretty much all cultures. It's one that's on the forefront of dialogue here in Australia about the role of women in leadership kinds of positions, and in particular, women in board positions. We know we can point to examples of very successful women in leadership roles. The CEO of Westpac here in Australia is a woman and she's been phenomenally successful in that job. She originally came up through the HR function so this is very much an anomaly in terms of a CEO career path but it just goes to show that there are potentials for senior-level leaders in all functions in organizations. So, being seen as a leader is partly about how you put yourself forward. If you don't put yourself forward you are less likely to be seen as a leader. I'm not exactly sure this is exactly the same as the 'lean in' phenomenon discussed by Sheryl Sandberg but it certainly relates to this notion that if you don't put yourself forward you are never going to be seen as a leader. There are a lot of men who don't put themselves forward either because of an introverted personality. So learning to embrace that stretch assignment, getting your ideas out, putting yourself forward, is more likely to enhance the perception of leadership than sitting back and hoping to be recognized for your potential.
SSB: What about organizations proactively seeking out people who have potential. Because it would be great if anyone who had an interest in leadership raised their hand and got picked. Sometimes too many people raise their hands. So there's still need to be able to pick the ones with the most potential, on whom the development investments are going to pay off the greatest. What are your thoughts about doing that effectively?
DD: We don't know how to measure leadership potential well. That's the answer. The way its typically implemented in organizations is through say talent reviews where people will sit around a table and talk about various executives in terms of their performance and their potential. You have objective information about their performance, especially if they are running a profit and loss business in terms of how well they're doing in their particular business but when it comes down to potential it comes down to people's subjective opinion about that person's potential. We need to do better and I think we can do better and its it's sorely needed in organizations of all kinds. How do we objectively measure leadership potential.
SSB: What about mechanisms like using Assessment Center, putting people through a day in the life of their target role. Do you think those types of things are predictive?
DD: Assessment centers we know from the research that they are the most highly valid predictors of job performance that's out there. Can they be used to predict leadership potential. Perhaps if the assessment center can somehow simulate adaptive challenges and those tend to be more difficult to do than technical challenges not saying that it's impossible but it requires a different approach to putting people into situations that require leadership and that's something that needs to be simulated in the high fidelity kind of fashion.
SSB: You used a very important term here adaptive challenges. Define that for us?
DD: Adaptive challenges are really things that there is no known solution for. So you have to basically learn your way out of a particular challenge and adapt to whatever the presenting contextual factors are and this differs from this notion of technical challenges which I talked about earlier which are things that we know what the solution is. It's more of a training approach of providing proven solutions to known problems. So for example a lot of engineering problems are technical challenges because it requires and can have an engineering solution to it. But the adaptive challenges tend to reside with people and those are not solved through engineering kinds of approaches and I have to share with you what are my favorite quotes from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughter House-Five. He said if it weren't for the people always getting caught up in the machinery, earth would be an engineer's paradise. I firmly believe that I think this is one of the reasons why engineers and accountants keep the leadership development industry in business because they get to a certain point in their career through mastering these technical challenges and then find themselves at a career crossroads where that's not needed anymore. What's needed is for them to engage with adaptive challenges.
SSB: Very interesting and certainly something I don’t hear talked about a lot in the industry. and I think it's something we need to pay more attention to. Do you see any organizations doing a good job in addressing adaptive challenges.
DD: That's an interesting question. I think I'm struggling here because I would need to have a much closer perspective on people in their day-to-day kinds of positions rather than looking at what's happening at the organization level as a whole. So the answer is I don't know who's doing a good job developing people to address adaptive challenges. I'm not sure that most leadership development approaches take that perspective.
SSB: That's very interesting. On that note I I'm going to ask you one final question and this is from my clients. You know there is a growing market on the neurological basis of leadership and several who claim that they use the brain science to grow better leaders. What are your thoughts on this area?
DD: Well do we have another hour?
SSB: Ha ha...five sentences or less, David!
DD: Thanks Shreya! I think the leadership and leadership development field has been plagued with fads and this is another indicator of that unfortunate trend. Here's why? Even if we were able to map the brain in terms of what lights up when someone for example is exposed to a transformational leader, using FMRI or other kinds of brain imaging technology, what would we do with that information? Also what if we could image the brains of highly effective leaders will that give us any information about developing other kinds of leaders. My answer is it might be very interesting from a more descriptive kind of approach but it's not very helpful in terms of what we do to prepare others for these adaptive leadership challenges. So I think it's an unfortunate trend or unfortunate fad that has turned the heads of a number of people not just in the leadership development space but in science in general, around this notion of mapping or imaging brains and coming to some insight about human behavior.
SSB: Excellent! Well David you definitely passed the challenge.
DD: Thanks!
SSB: That’s extremely informative because again around the world we've seen this industry to be growing and I know several of my clients have asked me about the validity of these claims that you can really develop leaders better by understanding how the brain functions. I'm sorry that we run out of time but I know there is so much more to talk about. I think our [listeners] will find your comments on leader emergence and leadership effectiveness to be very valuable, as well as the idea adaptive challenges. We need to have another session when you can come back and give us more ideas and [share] more recent findings from research. So until then, thank you so much for coming to our show. This has been tremendously valuable and I know our [listeners] are going to agree. Thank you again.
DD: Thank you, Shreya. I look forward to being invited back to carry on the discussion.
SSB: Absolutely, thank you so much.
SSB: Well, there you have it. You were listening to Dr. David Day, Woodside professor of leadership and management at the University of Western Australia. To learn more about talent management practices and the evidence base of this approach visit our website at www.humancapitalgrowth.com. See you again next time and best wishes until then.
SSB: Welcome David.
DD: Good day Shreya. Nice to talk with you.
SSB: Good day to you. It has been five years since you were on my SIOP panel on succession planning and we have met a couple times since then. It is so good to have you back for a conversation.
DD: Thank you. I am looking forward to it.
SSB: Before we get started, David, talk to us a little bit about some of your current research projects. What are the exciting things that you are finding?
DD: I'm really interested in longitudinal models of leader development, looking at how people change over time and in particular charting and understanding personal trajectories of development. That is personal trajectories of change and as a leader overtime. I'm also interested in extending this into more collective forms of leadership around leadership capacity so developing individuals is one thing but then developing collective leadership capacity. I think this is really where most organizations want to go. We are in the very early days in terms of the research around this but using tools such as social network analysis offer some really keen insights into developing not only individuals but this notion of a collective leadership capacity.
SSB: That's really fascinating David. As we move into a world of greater volatility I think the demands on leadership is just expanding it's not just one person's capability that's important but really it's the team's effort that's going to make a difference. So I'm certainly looking forward to hearing more about what you have. I just pulled out this statistics and I wanted to get your opinion. Last year the Economist group ran a survey with CEOs from around the world and they found that 43% of them believe that there is insufficient leadership talent to execute on their strategies. What's the real issue here? Are we missing on our ability to grow good leaders or do we simply not understand leadership effectiveness.
DD: If I had the answer to that one Shreya, that would be kind of the Holy Grail of helping organizations master their leadership development challenges but it's a complex, if not a wicked problem for organizations because it's dealing with this notion of development. It's dealing with this notion of what some would calls more soft kinds of skills rather than technical skills. Ron Heifetz talks about adaptive challenges verses technical challenges and a lot of the leaders who rise through the ranks have been doing so based on their skills to solve technical challenges. What's really needed at top levels are people who can not only engage in helping to solve the adaptive challenges but engage with others to do so. So this notion of having an insufficient leadership talent, I think it's due to many possible factors - one of which being this focus on technical verses adaptive challenges. Another one is in terms of not looking broadly enough for leadership potential within an organization. I think it was John Gardner who said that most people go through their lives using only a small fraction of their potential and one of these potentials is leadership potential. So why is it that some people have never considered leading. These are untapped resources that exists in every organization. So helping to facilitate that potential and to grow that potential would help go a long way towards addressing this leadership crisis.
SSB: That’s interesting, David. You said it's a question of identifying leadership talent. So let's go back to the age-old question, can everybody be a leader?
DD: I think so! Everybody can be a leader but everybody can not be THE leader if you get my drift, right? I get frustrated when people say "well, if everybody's a leader then who's going to follow". You know 'too many cooks spoil the broth' kind of a thing. I think this misses the point massively because leadership is not a position it's a process and it's a dynamic process that can involve a wide array of individuals. So while somebody may be the leader at a particular point of time someone else around the table could be the leader just a few moments later depending on who's exercising social influence and who's providing expertise. I think everyone can be developed to be a more effective leader and we need more effective leaders at all levels of organizations that doesn't mean everybody's going to be the CEO. It just means that people should embrace this responsibility to engage in leadership when it's needed.
SSB: So where should organizations be placing their efforts? Is it to grow just a few high potentials or grow leaders across the board?
DD: That's an excellent question. I'll I think most organizations take this high-potential leadership approach which has some underlying assumptions to it, which is that, leadership is somewhat of an exclusive process that only some people have a right to participate in. I mean that may not be the message that comes across explicitly but I think implicitly when you have a high potential kind of focus with your development that is the implicit message that leadership is not for everybody it's for only those special chosen ones. That's an unfortunate message. Having said that I realize that resources are tight in organizations and trying to invest in everybody's potential may not be possible given limited resources. So I think there's ways we need to rethink how we do development and one of them is to look at it as a 24/7 ongoing process rather than an investment in indifferent experiences or programs or so forth.
SSB: That's a really great idea, David, a 24/7 ongoing process. Now, I know that my counterparts in organizations are just going to flip hearing that. They are already stretched to the brim trying to grow their high potentials and you are saying make it 24/7. So tell us more.
DD: You know the technology is changing so quickly. There are resources that are now available that weren't available even just a few years ago in terms of being able to have ongoing feedback and ongoing assessments, that don't require taking people away from their work in order to develop. It's using their work in their experience to accelerate their development. So leveraging this technology is one way to do this. Another way is to embrace this more fully. I think it has to be something that transcends an HR Department. If development is only in the preview of HR it's never really going to be fully embraced in an organization. So we've got to somehow get the message across to line managers to support this 24/7 notion of leadership development.
SSB: That’s really interesting and it also converges with what a lot of senior leaders are saying about leadership development. I just read this interview in the McKinsey Quarterly about growing leaders in India, which you know is a topic dear to my heart given the huge potential there. What they were talking about is that leadership development cannot be just HR's responsibility and but they also said something interesting, which is, throw your leaders into the deep end and see who can swim. Is that a good strategy?
DD: Only if you want to invest in surf 'n 'life rescue. This raises an excellent point and it's tied into some fairly recent research to an article by Derue and Wellman in 2009 in the journal Applied Psychology. It's one of the first articles I accepted as an associate editor at JAP. I was looking at developmental challenges and the thinking of the researchers was that - there are challenges that are too extreme, almost an inverted U kind of shape. [What this means is] that [when] the challenge becomes too much of a stretch assignment it actually does more harm than it does good. [Although] they didn't find an inverted U, they did find a kind of plateau of a return on investment for developmental challenge. Once it got to be too high, except if the person had readily available access to feedback then that challenge didn't plateau, it continued to help with their development. So just throwing people off the deep end without support mechanisms is just a horrible idea and it really is putting people in over their heads in a way that makes people frustrated and almost a learned helplessness in terms of leadership development. But the good news is if we can build in high quality support then even really extreme challenges like throwing people into the deep end may actually help as long as there is a life preserver to be thrown to them.
SSB: And that’s really interesting. So going back to the original question - can everybody be leaders, my question to you again is can everyone overcome the plateau should they get access to feedback or are there individual differences [in one's ability to develop]?
DD: Well I'm a firm believer in individual differences and I think that there are some people who by virtue of what they were given through genetics and other things are just better suited to be leaders. They probably don't need as much investment in their development to really thrive as developing leaders. So for those people what those particular potentialities are is still a bit of a question. But certain people are more likely to thrive under extreme challenges than others for sure. To help others who struggle - one route maybe in terms of introducing more support mechanisms and feedback is one of those.
SSB: Let's talk about feedback. What kind of feedback is most beneficial? Is it specific to the task at hand? Or is it about the strategy and who they are as individuals? What is the research saying?
DD: The research is saying that not all feedback is created equal, and that as much as a third of feedback programs or feedback interventions have the opposite effect of what they intend. That is, they have a harmful effect on performance and development. So there are better ways to provide feedback and having it presented in a more objective and timely fashion is one way to do this. I'm a big fan of what the Center for Creative Leadership uses in their programs around what they call the SPI model of feedback, which stands for Situation Behavior Impact. It's a way of helping to make feedback more personal, more objective, and to lower the defensiveness of the recipient. [In this type of], feedback you talk about a situation in which you were in with somebody, the behavior that this person engaged in, and the impact that behavior had on you, not the organization as a whole, not everybody in the universe, what was the impact on you. When you frame it that way people are less likely to become defensive about it because they can't disavow the impact it had on you. They might disavow the impact it had on third party people but they can't disavow the impact it had on you. So learning to do this is pretty easy but implementing it on a daily basis proves to be a bit more difficult. We just struggle with providing good quality feedback to people and as a result we are cheating people of their learning. So another piece of this in terms of feedback - one of the natural reactions when people talk about feedback and can you give me some feedback it's like "oh no it's going to be negative...oh no it's going to be critical". An important point I think is that we miss the opportunities to provide positive feedback to people and the positive feedback is really a way of reinforcing what is being done right and just basic reinforcement principles. Learning principles would suggest that reinforcing positive behavior with positive feedback is a way of getting people to repeat that. But again, we seem to be very reluctant to do that perhaps because we think that people will then slack off or start taking advantage of us. But the research doesn't support that all. It actually supports the point that if you give people positive feedback they will tend to repeat the behavior that was reinforced.
SSB: Interesting David. Some of my clients [might] ask - is that culturally specific or universal. Do you have any information on that?
DD: Well sure. I think that we know a bit about cultural norms and one of the norms that is very important in certain cultures, Asian cultures is one of them-is this notion of power distance. So providing feedback to someone who is in a position above oneself probably would not be well-received. In certain cultures, unless there was a culture of feedback within the organization, even if this organization is situated in a cultural context were high power distance is the norm.
SSB: Very interesting. Certainly that could take up an entire podcast. We need to have you back, David. But moving to our next point about individual differences, what kinds of things are you seeing as being most predictive of leadership effectiveness?
DD: The things that are predictive of leadership effectiveness and by the way let me just go on a bit of tangent here about effectiveness because effectiveness is a pretty big construct. What is effectiveness? We tend to think more in terms of an outcome. [that is] the performance of an individual or the performance of an organization. But I think effectiveness also incorporates process issues that we tend to overlook. So in terms of leadership effectiveness it may not be just the outcome of that leadership that results in certain performance changes. It's the process by which those changes occur and we need to focus more on those process kinds of issues. Having said that - what are the kinds of things that predict leadership effectiveness, leadership performance and I think it comes back to what do we know about individual differences and what can we measure well. I think the answers to that are cognitive ability and also personality. We know from the research that those two things are highly related to leadership emergence and to some extent leadership effectiveness, which are two different things. By the way, there are no doubt many other potential construct out there that can predict leadership effectiveness up but we need to figure out how to measure them more appropriately. Some of the work that Dr. Matt Barney had been doing at Infosys and now doing as part of his company at Leaderamp is using Rasch measurement modeling to look at some of these other constructs and to measure them very rigorously. I'm really optimistic that this is going to open a treasure chest of other individual different measures that can protect leadership effectiveness.
SSB: That's wonderful David and I know Matt and you have been talking a lot about those measures. Can give us some insights on what types of things you are looking at?
DD: One of the things I've been working on in conjunction with a PhD student here at the University Western Australia is this construct of developmental readiness - is somebody ready to take on a developmental challenge. We tend to assume that everybody is, or based on other kinds of subjective squishy assessments we assume okay this person is ready to take on a global assignment somewhere those are pretty big structure assignment. If we had some measures that could assess the readiness of an individual to take on a developmental stretch assignment, I think that could help maximize the potential in that assignment for leadership development.
SSB: It's very interesting and also very practical and relevant. I want to go back again to something else you said earlier - the difference between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness. I know that in the business world there's a lot of focus on leadership effectiveness. There's also an assumption that people know how to pick leaders. Is leadership emergence about who has the potential to become a leader?
DD: Leadership emergence goes to this notion of perceptions- who is seen as a leader in a particular context. Some may say, well that's really not what we're interested in, we really interested in who's going to be effective. I think that those two things are not the same thing but they do interrelate and here's how. If you are seen as a leader you are much more likely to be able to influence someone than if you are not seen as a leader. And if social influences a core to leadership, as many approaches would argue, then being seen as a leader makes it easier or facilitates being effective as a leader. If you're not seen as a leader you may still be effective but it's going to be more difficult.
SSB: I think this has huge implications for people who are ambitious and who want to be leaders. Do you have any guidance particularly for women who tend to hit the glass ceiling much earlier in their careers. What can they do to be seen as leaders?
DD: Boy, I wish I had the answer to that because it's a problem that crosses pretty much all cultures. It's one that's on the forefront of dialogue here in Australia about the role of women in leadership kinds of positions, and in particular, women in board positions. We know we can point to examples of very successful women in leadership roles. The CEO of Westpac here in Australia is a woman and she's been phenomenally successful in that job. She originally came up through the HR function so this is very much an anomaly in terms of a CEO career path but it just goes to show that there are potentials for senior-level leaders in all functions in organizations. So, being seen as a leader is partly about how you put yourself forward. If you don't put yourself forward you are less likely to be seen as a leader. I'm not exactly sure this is exactly the same as the 'lean in' phenomenon discussed by Sheryl Sandberg but it certainly relates to this notion that if you don't put yourself forward you are never going to be seen as a leader. There are a lot of men who don't put themselves forward either because of an introverted personality. So learning to embrace that stretch assignment, getting your ideas out, putting yourself forward, is more likely to enhance the perception of leadership than sitting back and hoping to be recognized for your potential.
SSB: What about organizations proactively seeking out people who have potential. Because it would be great if anyone who had an interest in leadership raised their hand and got picked. Sometimes too many people raise their hands. So there's still need to be able to pick the ones with the most potential, on whom the development investments are going to pay off the greatest. What are your thoughts about doing that effectively?
DD: We don't know how to measure leadership potential well. That's the answer. The way its typically implemented in organizations is through say talent reviews where people will sit around a table and talk about various executives in terms of their performance and their potential. You have objective information about their performance, especially if they are running a profit and loss business in terms of how well they're doing in their particular business but when it comes down to potential it comes down to people's subjective opinion about that person's potential. We need to do better and I think we can do better and its it's sorely needed in organizations of all kinds. How do we objectively measure leadership potential.
SSB: What about mechanisms like using Assessment Center, putting people through a day in the life of their target role. Do you think those types of things are predictive?
DD: Assessment centers we know from the research that they are the most highly valid predictors of job performance that's out there. Can they be used to predict leadership potential. Perhaps if the assessment center can somehow simulate adaptive challenges and those tend to be more difficult to do than technical challenges not saying that it's impossible but it requires a different approach to putting people into situations that require leadership and that's something that needs to be simulated in the high fidelity kind of fashion.
SSB: You used a very important term here adaptive challenges. Define that for us?
DD: Adaptive challenges are really things that there is no known solution for. So you have to basically learn your way out of a particular challenge and adapt to whatever the presenting contextual factors are and this differs from this notion of technical challenges which I talked about earlier which are things that we know what the solution is. It's more of a training approach of providing proven solutions to known problems. So for example a lot of engineering problems are technical challenges because it requires and can have an engineering solution to it. But the adaptive challenges tend to reside with people and those are not solved through engineering kinds of approaches and I have to share with you what are my favorite quotes from Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughter House-Five. He said if it weren't for the people always getting caught up in the machinery, earth would be an engineer's paradise. I firmly believe that I think this is one of the reasons why engineers and accountants keep the leadership development industry in business because they get to a certain point in their career through mastering these technical challenges and then find themselves at a career crossroads where that's not needed anymore. What's needed is for them to engage with adaptive challenges.
SSB: Very interesting and certainly something I don’t hear talked about a lot in the industry. and I think it's something we need to pay more attention to. Do you see any organizations doing a good job in addressing adaptive challenges.
DD: That's an interesting question. I think I'm struggling here because I would need to have a much closer perspective on people in their day-to-day kinds of positions rather than looking at what's happening at the organization level as a whole. So the answer is I don't know who's doing a good job developing people to address adaptive challenges. I'm not sure that most leadership development approaches take that perspective.
SSB: That's very interesting. On that note I I'm going to ask you one final question and this is from my clients. You know there is a growing market on the neurological basis of leadership and several who claim that they use the brain science to grow better leaders. What are your thoughts on this area?
DD: Well do we have another hour?
SSB: Ha ha...five sentences or less, David!
DD: Thanks Shreya! I think the leadership and leadership development field has been plagued with fads and this is another indicator of that unfortunate trend. Here's why? Even if we were able to map the brain in terms of what lights up when someone for example is exposed to a transformational leader, using FMRI or other kinds of brain imaging technology, what would we do with that information? Also what if we could image the brains of highly effective leaders will that give us any information about developing other kinds of leaders. My answer is it might be very interesting from a more descriptive kind of approach but it's not very helpful in terms of what we do to prepare others for these adaptive leadership challenges. So I think it's an unfortunate trend or unfortunate fad that has turned the heads of a number of people not just in the leadership development space but in science in general, around this notion of mapping or imaging brains and coming to some insight about human behavior.
SSB: Excellent! Well David you definitely passed the challenge.
DD: Thanks!
SSB: That’s extremely informative because again around the world we've seen this industry to be growing and I know several of my clients have asked me about the validity of these claims that you can really develop leaders better by understanding how the brain functions. I'm sorry that we run out of time but I know there is so much more to talk about. I think our [listeners] will find your comments on leader emergence and leadership effectiveness to be very valuable, as well as the idea adaptive challenges. We need to have another session when you can come back and give us more ideas and [share] more recent findings from research. So until then, thank you so much for coming to our show. This has been tremendously valuable and I know our [listeners] are going to agree. Thank you again.
DD: Thank you, Shreya. I look forward to being invited back to carry on the discussion.
SSB: Absolutely, thank you so much.
SSB: Well, there you have it. You were listening to Dr. David Day, Woodside professor of leadership and management at the University of Western Australia. To learn more about talent management practices and the evidence base of this approach visit our website at www.humancapitalgrowth.com. See you again next time and best wishes until then.
Related Learning and Certifications Option
|
|
|
|