Copyright MCB UP Limited (MCB) 2005Experience is not so much what happens to you as what you make of what happens to you (Aldous Huxley).
We contend that high performance businesses will achieve a sustained competitive advantage over the next decade by operating from the premise that good leadership begets much more good leadership throughout the organization. Organizations that develop this multiplier mindset will increase the number and diversity of their leaders and will enjoy, as a result, more innovation and greater flexibility and adaptability. But it won't be easy. Central to building this important capability is an understanding of the role experience plays in creating leaders.
It is becoming increasingly clear that experience is the best teacher of leadership. In an Accenture study of leaders under the age of 35 and over the age of 70, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, social activists, and elected politicians unanimously agreed that they had learned more about leading from real work and life experiences than from leadership development courses or MBA programs. They credited the latter with helping them become more competent technically, but they concluded that formal programs do little to help people learn fundamental lessons or how to extract wisdom from experience.
 | |
This doesn't mean companies should rush to scuttle their development programs or training budgets. Innovative new approaches to leadership development that blend formal training, e-learning, coaching, and knowledge sharing should be employed to extend and amplify the experiences acquired on the job by employees at all levels. These approaches should all be part of what we call experience-based leadership development, a method of helping organizations grow the leaders they need to achieve high performance.
Experience-based leadership development
The experience-based approach represents a comprehensive new way of developing leaders. It knits together on-the-job experience, life experience, and specific skill development, rather than presenting employees with a smorgasbord of classes and programs that is tenuously linked (if it is linked at all) to career development, succession planning, or business objectives. The experience-based method can be adapted to the developmental needs and opportunities of people at all stages of their careers, and also to the changing needs of organizations operating in complex and uncertain environments.
Experience-based leadership development consists of three major processes - preparing, developing, and preserving - that together produce skills needed by leaders at all levels as well as a concept of leadership practice that encourages lifelong learning (see Table I).
An individual's experiences on and off the job are remarkably fertile ground for learning. They can include:
| Table I The key phases of experience-based learning |
* crucible-like challenges (such as recovering from a personal financial disaster, re-energizing a work force demoralized by heavy layoffs, or launching a make-or-break new product);
* major but more conventional tasks (such as fulfilling a rotational assignment or foreign posting); and
* routine but difficult activities (such as coaching a talented but frustrated employee or carrying out incremental change).
Some experiences can be planned; others "just happen." What's vital is that they all be seen as core elements of a learning process.
The goal of experience-based leadership development is to equip employees to mine their experiences - continuously and intensively - for insight into what it takes to lead, what it takes to grow as a leader, and what it takes to cultivate the leader in others (peers and superiors as well as subordinates). Most corporate leadership-development programs, we have found, overlook the opportunity to prepare people to learn from experience. They focus on skills and tactics and, far too often, organizational rules and regulations. The experience-based approach, by contrast, uses a powerful, research-driven framework to link the leadership development activities an organization already has in place - classroom training, assessment centers, career development, succession planning, performance management, and the like - with real work assignments and with innovative uses of information and communication technology. The result is a comprehensive process for developing leaders at all levels of an organization.
Preparing
Individuals must be prepared in several important ways to learn to lead through experience. Consider the approach taken at NASA's Goddard Space Labs outside Silver Spring, Maryland. Executives at the labs must work to help revitalize an agency whose "organizational failures," in the words of a blue-ribbon investigative panel, contributed directly to two shuttle disasters and a number of embarrassing missteps with Mars probes. Among those organizational failures was the absence of leaders who would encourage criticism and debate - the kind of open communication that might have alerted decision-makers to known risks.
"Leadership alchemy" is an important part of Goddard's answer to critics. It focuses on bringing out the leadership capabilities of a broad cross-section of employees - support staff, machinists, technicians, lab researchers, scientists, and managers - by means of both art and science. For example, participants in classroom sessions might debate the latest empirical studies of leadership attributes and predictors and then define and apply measures to assess whether better leaders generate better results. But they would also treat leadership as an art, discussing and interpreting critical events and interactions that have tested their own abilities. A vital dimension of leadership alchemy at Goddard involves gaining insight into how individuals learn - and with that insight, accelerating individual learning. So while some meetings in the program focus on skill building, others zero in on learning styles and what enables some people to master a skill faster or more completely than others.
Helping people understand their own best learning style is one of the keys to preparing leaders; the other is helping them to understand what kind of lenses they use as observers. In other words, leaders must recognize how their own motives, aspirations, values, stereotypes, and expectations shape what they see. There is no shortage of tools that can be used to these ends; many, such as personality assessments and learning-styles inventories, are available electronically. But in many organizations, such tools are difficult to find outside a formal classroom setting and are usually quite expensive to acquire or license for one-time use. When the investment is made, the tool is often used only once, for diagnostic or assessment purposes, rather than forming part of an ongoing process.
Experience-based leadership development, by contrast, makes these tools available when people need them - often through web- and portal-based technologies - and links them to an individual's specific developmental stage and work situation. For example, the experience-based approach leverages the dramatic improvements that have been made recently in the use of simulation and virtual reality to present learners with truly encompassing leadership situations.
Boeing's simulation for the as-yet-infant underwater transportation industry is a case in point. Originally an outgrowth of Boeing's desire to integrate two major acquisitions, Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas, the simulation centers on "AquaTek" and two other fictional competitors. Participants in the simulation are assigned to all the major functional roles one might find in a small but growing business and are given realistic budgets and constraints. They draft learning contracts based on their experiences during the simulation and these, in turn, become a vital guide for the coaches responsible for follow-through. Even during the simulation, coaches review the experience with participants as individuals and in their teams.
The simulation experience is like spring training for major league business. According to Ron Marcotte, deputy general manager of Air Force Systems for Boeing, "It gets people out of their comfort zones and stirs them up to learn about everybody else's business. On the last day you end up presenting to the real CEO, and nerves go to a fevered pitch." The whole process is ideal preparation for future leaders and has the added benefits of providing a crossroads for the company's far-flung leadership and giving peers the opportunity to witness one another's business strengths directly. In that respect, it is far superior to teambuilding exercises via whitewater rafting or egg-drop competitions.
Developing
Useful as such simulation tools are, they are not sufficient for leadership development. In order to grow in the role, leaders need to hone their sense-making skills - not only to ensure that they make the most of their experiences but also to increase their ability to communicate what they've learned and to make practical use of their insights. Some of these skills complement one another in powerful ways; for example, training in emotional intelligence makes individuals far more aware of the sentiments and motivations of others, and skill in storytelling increases the impact a leader can have in communicating information. Familiarity with - and the opportunity to practice - different decision-making and leadership styles increases the odds that a leader can better match his or her behavior to the demands of a given situation. Most important, this approach to leader development directly addresses the perennial complaint that most people have when contemplating their own performance as leaders: "Who has the time to practice new things when they have to perform continuously?" When leaders have no time to practice, they must learn to practice while they perform.
The experience-based approach bridges the gap between practice and performance through creative uses of information and communication technology. On-line coaching, knowledge sharing, chat rooms, and classrooms make the most of experiences people are having as they are having them. There's no waiting for an off-site in which to rehash events that took place months ago. Collaboration software, whether through peer-to-peer or asynchronous communication tools, makes it possible for people scattered over the globe to engage in conversations about common experiences and to query one another in ways that approach the vividness of the classroom but at a fraction of the cost or logistical complexity.
Preserving
The third part of the framework is preservation of experience. Leaders must be able to communicate the lessons experience has taught them; they need what leadership expert Noel Tichy has called a "teachable point of view." But the teachable point of view must be open to adaptation, amendment, and change as an individual's newer and different experiences dictate. Some of those experiences will be personal and unique, but they can and should be supplemented by the lessons shared with a community of leaders. In the preparing process, leaders should build their own advice networks - people to whom they can turn for honest, critical, and timely advice. In the preserving phase, those same people serve as a learning community, a forum in which insights can be shared and where personal dilemmas, problems, and achievements are presented and discussed. Experience-based leadership development dramatically enhances the ability of people to document their experiences and to take on the role of coach or mentor to potential leaders of the future.
Designing experiences and learning to lead
People often face crucible experiences in their lives - transformative events or tests that come at them without warning. As Warren Bennis and Robert J. Thomas wrote in their book Geeks and Geezers, the principal types of crucible have a direct organizational analog. In other words, organizations may in fact have the ability to incorporate the transformative power of crucible experiences to help leaders achieve important insights and chart for themselves a lifelong learning agenda. Table II depicts the types of crucibles, examples from the study, and potential organizational analogs.
Crucibles like rotational assignments and the need to make go/no-go decisions involving highly risky opportunities may not seem different from standard practice in many organizations. What's different in experience-based leadership development is that each phase is integrated into an overall strategy, rather merely being part of a pick-list. For example, it is essential to prepare a potential leader to make the most of a rotational assignment (for example, providing training in observation, reading situations, assessing individual perceptual biases, and learning strategies). This is also an excellent time in which to create a learning community (such as one made up of peers going out on similar assignments) or network through which experiences or problems can be discussed. While the executive is on assignment, organizations need to provide guidance and training on how to experiment with different leadership styles and assess the results. And when an assignment is complete, individuals need to be given time with their learning community in order to preserve the critical lessons they've learned.
 | |
| Table II Designing leadership experiences |
The challenge to companies aspiring to sustained high performance is both breathtakingly simple and daunting: they must grow more leaders over a larger terrain and faster than ever before. Competitive turbulence, market turmoil, and geopolitical instability demand it. Advances in learning models, information technology, and leadership research strongly suggest that new approaches like experience-based learning hold strong promise in helping companies meet the high performance challenge.
| [Sidebar] |
| How leadership generates increasing returns |
| Most senior executives today agree about the importance of leadership to business success. They recognize that the quality and maturity of an organization's leaders can spell the difference between being good and being great. They understand that the reliability of an organization's leadership pipeline can enable - or disable - efforts to grow. And when they are asked to identify the most important items on their agenda, executives routinely point to leadership development as an extremely high priority. |
| Many companies, however, too often behave as if leadership were governed by the law of diminishing returns. Thus they carefully guard access to leadership development opportunities and slash training budgets at the first sign of an earnings dip. |
| Applying the law of diminishing returns to leadership is a mistake, because there's plenty of reason to believe that leadership generates increasing returns - the more you use, the more you have. Leaders who demonstrate integrity and conviction, who strive in earnest to develop people and create a shared vision, and who unleash energy around them produce superior results. Not only that: they stimulate more leadership from the people in their orbit. In other words, effective leadership has a multiplier effect. |
| General Electric demonstrated its grasp of the idea of increasing returns in the 1980s by formulating a common process for making change (work out) and by making hands-on, real-time training in leadership accessible to a broad swath of employees. Recognizing that in the future organizational change would be continuous rather than episodic, GE's management sought intentionally to grow the pool of employees who were equipped to lead change not just once but many times. They also recognized that change leaders often emerge from unanticipated quarters; rather than limit training to a carefully selected few, they waited, watched, and then engaged people who had demonstrated both initiative and interest. |
| [Sidebar] |
| "In an Accenture study of leaders under the age of 35 and over the age of 70, entrepreneurs, corporate executives, social activists, and elected politicians unanimously agreed that they had learned more about leading from real work and life experiences than from leadership development courses or MBA programs." |
| [Sidebar] |
| "Advances in learning models, information technology, and leadership research strongly suggest that new approaches like experience-based learning hold strong promise in helping companies meet the high performance challenge." |
| [Sidebar] |
| "The experience-based approach represents a comprehensive new way of developing leaders." |
| [Author Affiliation] |
| Robert J. Thomas, the executive director of the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business in Wellesley, Massachusetts, is also an associate partner in the Accenture Human Performance service line (robert.j.thomas@accenture.com). His book, Geeks and Geezers (2002), was co-authored by Warren Bennis. Peter Cheese, the global managing partner of Accenture Human Performance, is based in London (peter.cheese@accenture.com). |