Getting Leader Development Right:

Competence Not Competencies

Prepared to: DR.ARIK PRASETYA,SOS,M,SI,PHD

Leader development is not working. Witness the “corporate crises du jour,”for example, at Disney, AOL Time Warner, Morgan Stanley. Beneath the surface of each is a failure of leadership.

A typical contemporary leadership development approach begins with an elaborate (expensive and time-consuming) process of identifying competencies believed to characterize effective leaders. These competencies provide a basis for developing human resource (HR) programs, especially training programs, intended to develop the competencies.

As appealing and logical as the competency approach may be, the emphasis is misplaced. The focus instead should be on using experiences to develop competence, rather than on preconceived competencies that may not have anything to do with effective leadership. We believe a more effective approach would:

Identify strategically relevant leadership challenges, not a list of individual competencies

Use the strategic challenges to identify critical developmental experiences, not as the rationale for competency models that drive training and HR programs

Identify people who can make the most of the experiences offered, not those who already can do what the experiences could teach

Find ways to get people into the experiences they need, rather than just selecting people for jobs or sending them to training programs

Help people learn from their experiences rather than let them sink or swim

Why Leader Development isn’t Working

The real reason leader development is not working is that it has the wrong focus

It has focused on competencies rather than on results.

Executive culture and language is about business results and financials—leader development is instead tied to a short list of knowledge, skills, attitudes, abilities that are theoretically necessary to be an effective leader. Sold as “a common language” and as the first step in “developing and validating a company-tailored leadership model,” the competency lists look remarkably similar from organization to organization.

When we sat in on the developmental staffing discussions of the CEO and his team in a large high-tech company, we found exactly that—the language of the executive suite was competence, demonstrated by experience, results, and capabilities, not competencies. Here is the language of a real-life top team:

“The customers bring up his name to me.”

“It’s a tough job dealing with [a major customer] day in and day out, and she’s done a fabulous job.”

“He is relentless in cutting cost out and he will deliver.”

“He’s a general business guy but he has the engineers’ respect.”

“He’s technically excellent and builds a team beyond belief.”

What Companies Could be Doing

Although experience is clearly the principal school for leadership, the bad marriage to the competency approach is perversely strong. Its logical appeal and usefulness in creating the appearance of integrated processes and systems apparently compensates, in the minds of many, for its ineffectiveness in actually developing leadership talent. Simply paying attention to development by creating competency lists and doing something by offering programs and processes masks the fundamental fallacy of the approach.

Identify Challenges, Not Competencies

Where do executives learn how to deal with these kinds of challenges? Through experience. What experiences? Step 1 in leader development should be identifying the leadership challenges that the strategy will create. It is then possible to talk about the kinds of experiences that a talented person might need to prepare him or her for those challenges.

using the business strategy to identify the important developmental opportunities is the crucial link. Trying to identify a list of competencies that top executives should have is a distraction from the true task, which is developing competence through experience.

Identify Experiences, Not Programs

The good news is that experience is available every day to everyone. The bad news is that using experience effectively to develop executive talent is not as straightforward as offering training programs.

It is not the first priority of a business to develop people, so critical business needs may dictate giving jobs to proven players rather than to the people who might develop the most from having them. Furthermore, there is no science to dictate how to use specific experiences to develop specific skills in specific people at the right time.

For all these reasons, using experience rather than programs to drive the development process is itself a challenging proposition.

Identify People Who Can Make the Most of the Experiences Offered

If the goal is to use experience to develop competent executives rather than to develop executive competencies, then the challenge is to identify those people who will learn the most from the experiences they are offered. Adult learning is seldom very predictable, and it takes time. If it takes 10 years to become a master chess player, then leadership mastery would require at least as much investment in learning.

Create Mechanisms for Getting People into the Experiences They Need

But many powerful developmental opportunities require that a boundary be crossed in order to get the person needing the experience into it—several managers must cooperate. It is no small challenge to pull this off, and the most common process used to determine who gets what job is succession planning.

Help People Learn from the Experiences They Have

Experience may be the best teacher, but our understanding of how it teaches leaves much to be desired. The fickle nature of experience has spawned aphorisms, such as “Some people have 20 years of experience while others have one year of experience 20 times.”

The Essential Role of the Developmental Leader

The most important external factor in a manager’s learning from job experience is the immediate boss. Our research has demonstrated that the boss is across the board the most important factor in developing executives. There is more, however, to being a developmental boss than modeling best practices, mentoring, and coaching. We identify two things, one intentional and one that takes place as a by-product of effective leadership.

What do we know about “what, when, where, how, and why” leaders develop?

The work is challenging. It stretches our limits, it may be a sprint or a marathon, but it is no “walk in the park.” There is lots of ambiguity; we feel we are operating in uncharted waters, on the edge.

There are clear goals and direction. People know what is expected of them. The expectations may be broad (solve the problem, open a plant) or narrow (ship 40 percent more boxes with no errors), but people know what has to get done.

People are held accountable. Sometimes the accountability is implicit, such as the self-imposed pressure to succeed in the eyes of one’s peers; sometimes it is more explicit, when performance, both good and bad, has consequences, and everybody knows what they are.

There is emotion in the organization. People learn and remember when ideas and feelings happen together. There may be ups and downs, high points and low, but engaged organizations are seldom boring.

The Role of Executive Coaching

The range of leadership development interventions continues to expand, limited only by the imagination of HR people. Examples include 360 feedback, action learning problems, outdoor exercises. Executive coaching, however, may well be the fastest growing and now most common practice designed specifically to help people learn on the job.

That said, what makes coaching work? There is a growing consensus on the essentials for an

effective executive coaching program:

Qualified coaches. Choosing an executive coach is surprisingly similar to selecting other consultants—good coaches have credibility based on expertise in helping executives, an understanding of business

Targeted development. Executive coaching goes off track when there is no clear focus for the engagement. Coaching-experienced organizations find that coaching gets the best results for both the organization and the executive when the focus is on improving performance

A partnership of effort. The individual executive, the coach, and the organization are partners in the effort to improve performance.

Time-limited applications. Executive coaching works when there is a sunset clause, a defined period (often 6 months or a year) for the engagement. When coaching is working, there is a tendency to extend the engagement indefinitely.

THANK YOU