Leadership Consumption
To foster belonging, organisations must allow transgression.
Years ago, I found myself planted in the ground, like a tree. My earth-covered feet were buried under the surface, as I stood there during a leadership retreat, feeling somewhat puzzled. Around me loomed a forest of corporate sustainability managers whose meditation I joined as my legs felt soar.
In and of itself, it wasn’t a bad experience. Nor was it a very enlightening one, at least not much beyond the emotions we were duly briefed on. What struck me the most though, was that we didn’t get to dig our own holes. For the most part, someone else took care of it for us. As a result, the holes were of similar shape and depth, and scattered over a hill in a consistent fashion.
My implicit feedback on this anti-consumerist leadership retreat was harsh and made me pause for a moment, as if I had bumped into a tree.
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If you are in the business, you know that breeding leadership is difficult and contextual. Yet, the range of premium on-the-shelf offers begs to differ and leaves us to wonder whether the increasing consumption (i.e., disconnection) of leadership programs were not only saying something about the participants, but the providers themselves.
Taking both into account, we uncovered four leadership clichés on which to reflect.
#1. The ‘frontier’ experience. What is the goal of having your team ride horses, dive with sharks, or stumble over an obstacle course?
#2. The guest ‘star’. Does your sales team need to meet an astronaut if you want them to reach for the moon?
#3. The ‘over-engineered’ group activity. Will the decision to team up with a functional manager and an operational team leader to build a wooden raft foster greater collaboration within your organisation?
#4. The ‘after-thought’. What do you expect to discover when an external guest links their own experience to the core of your 2030 strategic vision?
Those four types of activities ask participants to be more audacious, experience risks, feel inspired to dare greatly, take initiative, or proactively build on their organisation.
‘What’s the matter with all those activities then?’, asked the Mouse.
Intrinsically, not much. Some may sound appealing to you, and a good trainer/facilitator can surely achieve wonders. There is also no question that stepping back from the day-to-day can be very helpful, and that there is inherent value in blowing off some steam and having outright fun as a team. Unfortunately, it is not enough.
One needs to acknowledge that leadership activities are not solely geared towards teams—they also promote a certain leadership culture claimed by their organisation. Hence, we run the risk of having leadership activities feel scripted to participants, as if they were being tested for loyalty or cohesion.
To avoid a consumerist attitude to leadership development, the invitation to join in needs to be authentic and credible. If authenticity depends on how the leadership activity is managed, credibility results from what happens beyond. This is where leadership and management are intertwined. The former is not only a cultural matter, and the latter is not the sole realm of organisational processes and practices.
To that end, a few tips are worth keeping in mind:
Forging safe spaces. When inviting people to take part in an experience, organisations should ensure that the participants feel safe, both physically and emotionally.
Unlocking emotional intelligence. To ensure team members can tap into the power of emotional intelligence, emotions must be recognized and respected in the workspace–and not just in special leadership development activities.
Empowering initiative and creativity. When inviting people to engage with a star personality, one should ensure that everyone involved feels entitled to be creative, express their thoughts openly, and take initiative.
Connecting the dots. Processes must be in place to bridge the gap between the enthusiasm and uniqueness of a retreat and the traditional monotony of the day-to-day workplace.
Going beyond buzzwords. For a collaborative experience to be meaningful, leadership must “walk the talk” and effective collaborators must be rewarded over competitive managers.
Organisations failing to align leadership and management risk being perceived as intrusive or even condescending by the teams they reach out to. People can consciously rally behind a leadership culture but if you force it upon them, you risk alienating them, trading audacity for obedience.
Teams in charge of learning and development cannot take it upon themselves to ensure consistency in management practices across their organisation. However, they can shift the way they approach leadership development, reframing a predefined invitation to belong into an opportunity to contribute to shaping organisational culture. It requires engaging participants regarding what they value and what they would like to do.
By focusing on the process, learning and development teams can give agency back to participants, without losing control of the cultural and managerial objectives that they promote. Aligning expectations reinforces consistency between culture and practice. It can also contribute to the personal and professional growth of those who are extending the invitation in the first place, serendipitously.
In other words, to foster belonging, organisations must accept the possibility of transgression. Those who are willing to take that risk may be rewarded with the audacious leaders that they aspire to see.
Baptiste Raymond - 09/2023.