Challenging the training approach to leadership development

In this paper, we explore new approaches to leadership development, questioning traditional methods and presenting innovative strategies to enhance leaders’ capabilities and impact. Download the paper for the results.

Reading time: 2 minutes

Taking a look at the development of leaders

In this paper, we review and challenge some of the traditional ways of thinking in leadership development, and propose some more compelling ways of enhancing leaders’ capability and impact. As practitioners, we love the challenge of leadership development. We innovate, test, research, reflect, and learn together in the flow of our work with clients.

This makes us uneasy about the state of the game and we’ve started asking ourselves:

• Are leadership development providers doing work that will really make a difference?
• Are clients even asking for the right thing in the first place?
• Are participants more confident and capable from the development they’re experiencing?

What we did so far:

When you deploy leadership development, you have to make choices. Drawn from our experience over the years, we distilled these into five key dilemmas. We created short website articles exploring each one and invited audience responses through some polls on LinkedIn. You might even have contributed!

• Which outcome do you want to see more of in your leaders?
• Who do you want to reach, and how much impact do you need?
• What learning dynamic do you want to cultivate?
• Which stimulus is going to help your leaders develop?
• What degree of design are you looking to invest in?

The following pages tell the story, based on over 100 poll responses. Download the paper for the results below!

As always, we’re here to help. And if this is a choice you’re working through, we’d love to chat.

Tim Janisch

Director of Leadership and Team Development

tim.janisch@q5partners.com