Leadership development needs top management
A current study of the University of Osnabrück (Prof. Steinert) more than clearly confirms our experiences:Leadership development does not work without the consequent integration of senior executives.
As long as the results of the respective executive are correct, companies accept bad leadership.Senior executives at their advanced stage of personal development are willing to participate in corresponding leadership programmes only to a very limited extent. Although matureness unfortunately does not always correlate with excellent leadership.
Even though senior executives can often be motivated to initiate processes on the subject of “leadership culture / leadership behaviour“, they too quickly pull back from the process before a successful anchoring of the desired condition was really able to take place.
Which conclusions can be drawn from this?
The top management is perfectly aware of the fact that the leadership culture is an important factor for success. The tendency to delegate this to the HR department right after the kick-off seems to be similarly strong. However, HR in many companies still struggles with its own importance and influence. Programmes from the HR department are therefore not seen as being truly business relevant. In the end its mostly young executives and only just the medium management that participate in respective leadership seminars - sometimes more pushed than truly motivated.
The solution is clear:
Leadership development is a longterm investment that requires a great deal of patience, similar to research & development, and needs - how Stiefel (2012) nicely calls it - “cultural heroes“, senior managers that authentically exemplify the target culture.
Leadership behaviour and performance must be continuously evaluated, refer e.g. to the google feedback on a quarterly basis.
Bad leadership must be sanctioned similar to bad results.
Supervisory boards in their controlling function should focus more attention on how serious the board of directors and the management take the subject.
In the future one should seriously consider having executives be selected or deselected by the employees, as it has already been successfully implemented in some companies (e.g. Semco in Brazil, Gore & Associates in the USA or Crytek in Germany).
One thing is certain: Companies that have always been implementing the above listed measures, will also in the future have a clear competitive advantage.