Leadership development is a primary focus of executive coaching. And it's no wonder. A recent McKinsey study estimates that organizations spend around $50 billion on leadership development efforts. Yet, they also report that only 11% of CEOs believe their leadership development programs are successful in achieving desired results.
According to McKinsey, there are four reasons that leadership development efforts fail: overlooking context, decoupling reflection from real work, underestimating mindsets (tacit thoughts, feelings, perceptions and beliefs that guide actions) and failing to measure results.
Coaches can take the lead in addressing these shortfalls by focusing on the elusive obvious: helping clients increase their learning power. Rather than reacting to current practices of delivering one-size-fits-all leadership development programs, coaches can add value by first developing learners who become leaders of themselves and others. By placing the emphasis on learning, people can continue to transform themselves over the course of a lifetime.
Here’s what a program on learning from experience looks like and what it can do for your clients, their organizations and you:
1. Identify implicit preferences and mindsets through learning style.
An individual has an approach to learning, and it impacts everything about their life and the way they approach their experiences. Just like a fish fails to recognize it is swimming in water, people are totally enveloped in their experience. Each day, they swim in their stream of conscious experience, surrounded by the ongoing story of their lives. This is all so familiar that they may not recognize they deal with life in a habitual manner.
These preferences can be defined by a person's learning style. A learning style is the way people prefer to navigate the experiential learning cycle, placing emphasis on certain aspects and avoiding or underutilizing others.
There are nine learning styles, and they show up generally through preferences for relationships, information, analysis or achievement. For example, by understanding her learning style, Regina recognized that she preferred to focus on information and analysis. Because she valued accuracy so deeply, she often failed to use other styles such as acting and initiating. While these would help her to achieve the results the organization needed, it required her to take some risk in the face of unknown outcomes.
Once people understand their learning style preference, they develop a deep self-awareness about the implications it has on all aspects of life and what they see as possible. Because learning styles are connected to preferences to steps in an ideal process of learning, they can intentionally expand from their comfort zone. This agility increases their learning power.
2. Create learning opportunities in life, not just in a classroom.
Research by Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo and Ann Morrison in Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job discovered that most learning and development takes place on the job, in the context of real work. However, many people are simply operating on automatic pilot, being unintentional about learning. This means they are completing tasks but not improving their performance, connecting the dots to link learning in one situation to another or continuing to mature.
Coaches can empower their clients to actually learn from every life experience through the process of experiential learning. By introducing clients to the learning cycle model, building self-awareness through learning style and challenging them to create a deliberate learning plan, they are setting them up for lifelong growth and development. After all, innovation, collaboration, teamwork, quality improvement, change and client development are actually learning.
Through experiential learning, clients can shift from "reinventing the wheel" to "recreating themselves and their organizations.”Armed with this power, clients will be able to experience the actual challenges that occur in their work and learn from them, continually improving and deepening their ability to manage and to lead. They will also be more prepared to adapt to the often unpredictable, changing circumstances they will encounter as leaders.
3. Measure results through processes and outcomes.
Coaches will want to make sure that they and the client identify an outcome that can be measured. These outcomes should measure both performance and learning.
Since learning happens over time, coaches can also help clients focus on monitoring the process of learning that drives outcomes. Is there an over-focus on one part of the process? If so, it means that another part is being neglected.
Take Regina who preferred the learning styles associated with analysis. She is adept at synthesizing facts and creating a plan, but can get so lost in the data that she fails to take action early or often enough. Her organization measured her unit’s outcomes in financial terms. Through coaching, Regina was able to monitor her expanded use of the learning cycle, too. For instance, she deliberately focused on taking small actions that would limit the risks she feared in order to gain experience implementing the solid plans she created. As she focused on the process of learning, she was intentional in moving around the cycle to increase her effectiveness instead of continuing to improve her accuracy.
Coaches can offer support when the client goes through the inevitable learning curve associated with stretching from their comfort zone or mastering new capabilities.
The bottom line: Clients will thrive from becoming learners who may become leaders. Coaches will thrive from recognizing this elusive obvious foundation that empowers clients long after the coaching engagement ends.
