Our organizations desperately want and need much stronger leadership and coaching at all levels. But most organizations aren’t significantly improving employee engagement, customer satisfaction, attracting and retaining top talent, succession planning, increasing health and safety, or energizing organization culture. Traditional leadership and coaching skill development methods are producing very little behavior change.
Current approaches are falling woefully short. A ten year global study showed 93% of executives feel their leadership development efforts aren’t working. It’s nearly unanimous! The opportunity cost is staggering.
Here’s why the same old methods are producing the same old results:
- Poor motivation: Traditional focus on fixing weaknesses undermines participant motivation for change.
- Downward spiral: Leaders micromanage, which results in reduced ownership and accountability for employees, reinforcing this negative cycle. Leaders end up crazy busy, overwhelmed, and frustrated.
- Missed connections: Leaders don’t make the connection between their personal effectiveness and falling employee engagement levels.
- Faulty feedback: Self-assessment of strengths and effectiveness is only half as accurate as feedback from everyone else.
- Negative 360 assessments: Traditional 360 assessments are negative and punishing. This faulty pathway to “improvement planning” is discouraging, demotivating and proven to be 2 to 3 times less effective in changing behavior.
- Development dead-end: There is no clear development roadmap for leveraging a leadership strength from good to great other than “try harder.”
- Poor coaching skills: Coaching is often confused with giving advice and doesn’t build long-term personal, team, or organization capabilities.
- Improvised coaching conversations: Leaders don’t know how to frame their coaching conversations, and jump into coaching discussions with little planning and no framework.
- Spray and pray: leadership and coaching development are rarely research-based using methodologies proven to boost effectiveness.
Reflecting on our research and Client work over the past few years I am now working on a complimentary webinar on Groundbreaking New Approaches to Leadership and Coaching Development for April 20. During this fast-paced overview I’ll outline how leaders and coaches can go from good to great and deliver truly extraordinary results. The session is geared to senior executive, HR/OD leaders, and senior operating executives.
Click here for more information and to register.
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