Two Things
I’ve been reading a fascinating book by some McKinsey consultants called Leadership At Scale. What makes it such a satisfying read is that their research and experience confirm what we’ve done in developing our Active Manager Programme. We’ve arrived at the same point but from a completely different route – our experience has been built up over 17 years of working with owners and managers of small businesses who are pretty demanding about the value of investment.
One of the reasons McKinsey is so successful is that a good deal of their exorbitant fees go into research. Across all their clients and work, they are able to perform deep analyses of what works and doesn’t work. Here are some examples:
Companies with top-quartile leadership effectiveness have on average a 3.5 times greater total return to shareholders (TRS) than companies with bottom-quartile scores, over a three-year period.
Organizations that invest in developing leaders during significant transformations are 2.4 times more likely to hit their performance targets.
Development programmes that cover the whole organisation are 6.4 times more likely to succeed than those that don’t.
Between 50 and 90 per cent of leadership development interventions are not successful
Different contexts require different leadership attributes. They make the point that what’s required in a steady state isn’t the same as what’s required for growth (and vice versa). So if the context is business transformation, then the key to leadership was to be adaptive. Achieving a fundamental shift in culture and performance means you have to be able to let go of past successes and embrace new and unfamiliar approaches. In their view, “being adaptive requires a high degree of self-awareness and a learning mindset. We have found that leaders who are self-aware and who have a learning mindset are 4 times more prepared to lead amidst change.”
I don’t have McKinsey’s fabulous research resources, so I can’t prove my theory, but I believe self-awareness and a learning mindset are essential in any stage of an organisation’s development. As Jack Welch said, “when the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
The big problem with most senior leadership teams is that they have demonstrated great knowledge and expertise in their area. They are experts, they know how to do this.
But the enemy of learning is knowing. There are all sorts of reasons why we have a lot invested in our current knowledge, and truly self-aware people understand that what they know today is unlikely to be as relevant tomorrow. As they used to say of the British Army, perfectly equipped for the last war.
Self-awareness and a learning mindset admit to the possibility that there are new and better ideas waiting to be discovered.
How expert is your senior leadership team? How open are they to new ways of thinking and working?