The Benefits of a Personalised Approach to Leadership Development.
In the last few blogs, I’ve looked at the headaches caused by leadership capability and effectiveness, and I’ve given my take on the priorities for addressing those headaches. One of these was the importance of continually developing and supporting your leaders.
In this blog, I’m going to take a deeper look at how personalisation is one of the best ways to unlock improved and continual leadership development.
By treating them as individuals, we create more opportunities for leaders to feel like their specific needs are being met.
The Drawbacks of Leadership Development Programmes
Traditionally, we see organisations invest in leadership development programmes as one-off events, sometimes linked to a project or strategic priority, which is how the money is found for funding them.
These tend to be a one-size fits all approach; everyone, or an identified group, go through the same development programme, in cohorts and across a defined period. Sometimes there is additional support such as peer coaching, 1:1 coaching, action learning groups and mentoring, but not always.
Depending on how the cohorts are identified, it could be you have a variety of levels of experience or a difference in team size and strategic responsibility for the organisation. This might be useful for the wider group, but it can be ineffective for those who are more experienced or are presented with different challenges in their role.
These are some of the other challenges with not considering the leader’s specific learning, development and support needs:
Costly, whether you are delivering internally or working with a partner.
Time-consuming – often a day or multiple days when you need a whole cohort to remain available.
Not effective enough due to the one-size fits all approach:
It doesn’t recognise the individual knowledge and experience already in play. This can lead to frustration for those involved in sessions which for them, don’t add value.
It doesn’t create the capacity to focus on the individual leaders’ development and support needs. The session they are covering might be useful, but it doesn’t delve deeply enough for the individual leader to connect it to their own development needs.
It can be detrimental to those who have a learning and thinking approach which doesn’t operate effectively in cohort or typical settings.
Research on formal training indicates that a low percentage of content is remembered. This creates “learning-doing” gaps limiting the transfer of learning into practical application.
It needs leaders involved to be incredibly motivated to aid the wider group and unlock the benefits of a cohort.
Organisational commitment and culture can be exposed when there isn’t visible support for the programme e.g., supporting release to the programme or top leaders not experiencing it themselves indicating the role modelling required for a successful leadership culture may not be present.
The Opportunities with Personalisation.
By implementing a personalised approach, you provide the leader with greater opportunity to tailor their development and support plan to their actual needs.
This connects with recent themes asking organisations to consider the question of employees as consumers, and this is where personalisation is felt and valued. To find out more about this type of mindset, I’d recommend looking at the Lucy Adams/DisruptiveHR model of EACH.
My view is that taking a personalised approach to leadership development will be a game changer for the quality and effectiveness of leadership development. That personalisation could form part of a delivered cohort programme, be it a digital solution or through a 1:1 facilitated or self-guided approach.
Let’s take a moment to clarify what I mean by a personalised approach to leadership development.
This is about focusing on specific areas of development and support, built around the leader, an approach that puts the individual at the heart of their development.
It’s about understanding the needs of that leader and providing learning, development and support options that will engage them, enable them, and empower them to grow – and keep growing.
It’s a tailored approach rather than one size fits all.
The opportunities with a personalised approach to leadership development, when it is done well, are:
It contextualises learning needs and makes them more real and applicable.
The leader can integrate their learning more directly because it is about helping them solve the challenges in front of them.
It more easily fits into the flow of their work because they are more in control of when it happens, lending itself to hybrid or remote working.
It gives greater autonomy, and therefore, they are more likely to feel empowered.
It’s better value, as you are paying for what’s needed rather than ticking off a list of requirements.
There are certainly challenges in enabling a totally personalised approach to leadership development to be considered. For example:
Can it be delivered and resourced effectively in-house, or will you need to work with external partners. This is a challenge with cohort-based programmes too.
If the leaders themselves are more in control of what development they do, how will you know if they are covering what you need them to? This can be avoided by working with leaders and partners on focus areas based on feedback and future requirements.
Can you afford it? If you are committed to investing in leadership development, then personalised leadership development may be a little more expensive than a one-size fits all approach, but the question is, can you afford to invest and not get a good return? This is about better results, but these solutions don’t have to break the bank.
As an additional resource for this topic, visit this Forbes article about “Why Most New Managers Fail and How To Prevent It”. Here they highlight how personalisation will make a difference in improving the quality of your leadership development approach.
I’d love to hear about your own experiences of implementing a more personalised approach to leadership development. What worked well, and what challenges did you face?
Please share in the comments, or you are very welcome to email me directly at anwen@purpleskyconsulting.co.uk.
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