Skipping maintenance anyone ?

You can skip the maintenance of your car. Nothing major will probably happen. And you can do the annual program just the next year. Or maybe you could even skip next year as well !

Leadership programs seem to be the first to get cut when cuts need to be made. It is way easier than to do something about the inefficiencies, or to address the structural issues that have grown over the years. So it's the leadership program that is sacrificed to "help" the company.

An organization's leadership development program is very much like a car. If you skip the program for a year, nothing major will happen. People will not start to leave in droves. And you will most likely not be faced with an acute shortage of leaders. All seems well ... If you intend to come back to the original program the year after, doubt will have started to creep in ... Is this program really necessary ? Nobody seems to be able to identify any damage from skipping it last year ... And it did help us to save XYZ US$ ! The argument for restarting becomes even more harder. All of the sudden the investment in people becomes a new burden, since we managed without last year.

That's why a leadership program is like a car. You can skip for a year, but whatever you do further down the road, you can never recover what was lost in that year. The minor damage that occurred to your engine from using bad oil or a blocked filter can never be erased. In an organization, that damage can be at different levels. People who had been told they would be part of a specific program will start to doubt if the company is really serious about their development. In general, employees will feel that leadership development, for all the nice vision statements, is dispensable. And managers will feel they do not have the tools to fully develop their teams for the challenges of the future.

And then we sometimes wonder why our surveys show that employees are not engaged !