Accelerating leadership development ?

Do you need to accelerate your leadership development ?

 

Not many business leaders would say they are not concerned about developing the teams that will lead their business in 5 or 10 years from now. There are plenty of business opportunities, but very often we are confronted by the question of who will take the lead of the company's growth. We know we cannot do everything ourselves. But we have doubts about our existing teams. We know their limits and think more about why they will NOT be able to deliver. We imagine that we will find that perfect pearl somewhere on the market. Someone that really has all the talents and qualities that will drive our business to the next level.

 

Yet leaders have come to realize that, although bringing in new talent is necessary, it is far from sufficient. When no explicit effort is in place to develop teams, those bright talents that joined will not stay around for long.

 

So what do you do to develop your teams ? Send them to more training programs ? Ask all of them to sign up for an MBA program ? Or make sure they all join the annual team building retreat ? All these are nice to have, and for sure appreciated by employees. They have almost become benefits. But after years of spending resources on these efforts, it is clear the impact is limited.

What works then ? A survey of 210 business leaders in Asia, organized by the Conference Board, looking for which approaches are most effective at accelerating leadership development, brought out Action Learning at the top of the list.

 

Action Learning is not as physical or fun as team building on the beach, or maybe not exciting as a training-session-with-games-and-role-plays. But it is for sure efficient in developing and growing talent.

There is no such thing as "the great question"

We all know the value of asking questions, rather than giving the answers (although the application of this principle may be more difficult). I am often asked "how do you ask a good question ?". There are blogs and even books that are written about "good questions" to ask. People make lists of the "top 10 questions" to ask in a coaching session.

This is pretty silly. There is no such thing as a good question, in absolute terms. My definition of a good question is a question that makes the other(s) think, and that this thinking leads to insights or breakthrough ideas. It is not about who asks the smartest question in the room. It is about what is the best question, for a particular context, at that particular time.

We recently ran an Action Learning session where one of the participants shared the concern she had about the motivation of her team members, given the fact that all of them had been working long hours for several months. She had brooded about this issue for quite some time and considered she was stuck.

If the participants in the session had read the books on asking good questions, they probably would have asked questions like "Why is this important for you ?" or "What would you do if there were no constraints ?". Great, open-ended and thought provoking questions ... in some circumstances. Instead, someone asked "Have you asked your team members what they think about this ?". "Of course" the problem presenter said "I don't know why I just think about this by myself without asking them what they think !". She explained that she had a very good relation with the team members, and that they often had lunch together and talked about everything ... except this issue. This was the end of the session ! The light bulb had gone off in the problem presenter's head. You might argue that it is rather basic to check with the other team members ... Well, maybe it is basic. For you. But that was not the case for her.

There are no rules for what makes a great question. The great question is the one that gets the light bulb going ... in the OTHER person's head, not in your's ! It depends on the other person, the context, and the particular moment in time. The next great question is not listed somewhere in a book ...