Image © Jose & MidJourney
Something happened this past week, reminding me of the complexity and awesomeness of human beings.
Leadership, people leadership (is there any other?). I have been improving my skills as a people leader all my life, I understood very early you can’t get anything done, in any domain of your life, without people leadership skills. I am so curious about people leadership that from 2017 to 2020 I did a PhD in design on the topic of Design(er) Leadership in Large Corporations. Design leadership, while being described often as the management of the conditions for design to grow and impact business results, it is first and foremost about people management.
In the 2018 report published by Harvard Business Publishing on the state of leadership development, in the executive summary the publishers write that “we found that effective leadership development programs are a major driving finding in organizations’ ability to successfully transform. Simply put, organizations that make Leadership & Development a true strategic partner have higher success rates with their transformation efforts than those that do not. Still, when we compared findings from the 2016 and 2018 studies, we saw that while many organizations have intended to give L&D a more strategic role, that objective hasn’t necessarily been achieved.” All industries represented in the F50 are in the midst or completed in the last three years a huge transformation, and the survey findings suggest that all too many leadership development programs today are not hitting the mark, citing 1. Insufficient Innovation, 2. Not enough Support from the Top, and 3. Questionable Program Effectiveness as the major obstacles.
Jeffrey Pfeffer in his ‘Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time’, “decades of writing, books, conferences, TED talks, blogs, speeches, and so forth have had no (let me emphasize that again) no effect in the aggregate on employee engagement, job satisfaction, leader tenure, leader performance, or the availability of leaders to fill positions. The leadership industry has completely failed”. He follows up by saying that the biggest problems arise from the confusion between how leaders “should” be versus how they are, and the reasons why they are the way they are. When listing reasons why leadership is failing, he mentions:
- No expertise or experience required to be a “leadership expert”.
- No, or even worse, misleading and misguided measures of program, book, and talk effectiveness.
- Divergent interests between leaders and those led, and even differences in measures of leader well-being and organizational success.
- Conceptual imprecision about leadership concepts and ideas (which is not just an academic issue).
Part of the way to learn about people leadership is to be led by others, and I have been fortuned enough to have had great people managers, and some not so good. Some of those that were great people managers, might not have been the best people I have met, some of them I never got close enough to know them as a person. Some of those that were not great people managers were great people, they tried hard to be good people managers. I have done more hours of people leadership training than I care to remember, I am sure there are people out there that might define me as a good people manager, but I am sure there are some that don’t, even great people managers cannot please everyone. I have come to believe there are human qualities that supersede any training for people leadership, I believe some people are just more natural at it, and while we can all improve in every domain, I believe natural and organic people leaders have an invisible advantage. When you are lucky to have a good people leader you know it, you feel it, your life improves, you learn and you evolve, you grow and many times you will end up moving on, and those people leaders will be a part of your life. This past week I remembered one of the best people managers I have had, and I reminded myself of why, and the impact she had on my life. She is so humble she’d hate it if I named her, thank you G.