Leadership and Leadership development

Traditionally, leadership development has been the province of the learning and development function, and structurally this group are sometimes isolated or remote from senior leadership and business strategy. Development is seen as a ‘cost’, one that gets cut during hard-times, and seldom authentically seen as a top-three priority of the CEO.

We offer a different view: that leadership development programmes can and should be made to pay for themselves ten-times over (in profit terms) over a two to three year period.

We also think there are too many theories, and many of them are worthless. Too many are ‘quick-fix’ recipes, or nice theories that stay just that. Our point of view is: that the theories are conceptually trivial, but application is a tough personal journey. We share the view of the Allied Signal CEO Larry Bossidy who said: “I can only change this company as quickly as I can change myself”. From our point of view, the limits to growth of most organizations are the vision and the capabilities of the top-leadership. However, we also find most of them find this point difficult to embrace emotionally, even if they ‘get it’ as a concept.

From our point of view, the kind of personal change that is required to produce entirely new levels of results takes time and investment. However, we’ve also seen organisations completely transform their performance (from lacklustre to stellar) after only 18-months of working with us. We believe our programmes to be among the best we’ve seen. During our formative years, we scoured the English speaking world, for who was doing what in leadership development and which programmes seemed to produce the best results. However, we also believe that there is much more to learn.