Most organisations today are thinking hard about how to differentiate themselves and innovate within their markets.
Almost everything is in flux—from AI advancements to market shifts and global dynamics—which means being agile and making fast decisions is critical. In response, the trend towards flatter organisational structures is continuing and we’re seeing leaders and people at all levels being asked to shape strategy, make decisions, and find solutions to complex challenges.
So how is this pushing down of complexity and responsibility reflected in how organisations are equipping their people to develop and adapt?
if we want to disrupt externally we also need to be prepared to disrupt internally
The realities leaders are grappling with
At Adeption, we have a front row seat to the challenges leaders are facing through our leadership development experiences. When we ask leaders about their top challenges, we find their answers reflect both the macro environment today and the need to develop core leadership capabilities to meet the demands of the moment.
The three key themes that come up are:
- The empowerment paradox: Leaders talk about a disconnect between being asked to innovate and find new solutions and having the space, support and genuine empowerment to do so. In some cases, this comes down to a leader’s own mindset and perceived barriers to get on and do things differently. In other cases, the environment is overly controlled—creating boundaries to experimenting, questioning, and innovating.
- Relentless pressure: Overwhelm is a theme that comes up often. There can be a range of factors behind this — the environment we’re operating in today, organizational culture, and multiple transformations happening at once. Another common driver of overwhelm is leaders holding the intention to protect their team. There can be a tendency to go into achiever mode and take a lot on themselves, with the noble intention of sparing others from overload. In fact, what they’re inadvertently doing is shielding their team from the opportunity to grow through stepping into discomfort to discover new capacity and ways of operating.
- The feedback flinch: Building a feedback culture takes courage. It’s common for leaders to withhold information that would be valuable to someone’s growth—and to team and organizational outcomes—because of concern around how the feedback will be received and the impact it might have. Yet this is a disservice: a healthy, constructive feedback culture is essential for individual and organizational growth.
My experience in leadership
These leadership challenges are very relatable. Before I stepped into leadership development, I experienced all of these challenges (and many more) as a leader. I worked in high performance cultures that, in my mind at least, didn’t always create a safe environment for opening up and sharing the challenges we were grappling with as individuals. Now I realize that if I’d had the support and permission to share, learn from and move through these types of challenges, I would have accelerated my development—and found leadership a whole lot easier.
When I got to the point later in my career, where I was able to reflect back on my challenges and failures with a different mindset, I got so much value from them. I realized these challenges were in fact my biggest source of growth. This is the mindset good leadership development promotes—and is why, in our rapidly changing world, it’s more important than ever to support people with the skills and permission to learn and grow.
The need to scale leadership development
The traditional approach to leadership development is to focus investment on the highest levels of leadership: the executive team and one level down. That was certainly my experience. The coaching and development support arrived when I progressed to senior leadership—but it would have been invaluable earlier on.
Now with complexity and responsibility pushing down in organizations, investment in leadership development needs to go with it. Put simply, if you’re democratizing leadership, you need to democratize leadership development.
Some learning and development teams—including many we work with— are already making bold changes in this direction. Others are more cautious. There can be concern around what if we try something new and disruptive and our stakeholders or the participants don’t like it?
Yet if we want to disrupt externally we also need to be prepared to disrupt internally. This may mean people don’t initially welcome new approaches—especially if it means stepping out of their comfort zone. And that’s ok, in fact it’s the role of learning and development teams to bring people into the zone of development, which does feel a bit uncomfortable.
What’s possible today
The changes and innovations we’re seeing in leadership development right now are exciting. As Adeption’s Chief Leadership Officer Americas, Corey Criswell recently shared, a number of clients we work with are starting to take an ‘unprogram’ approach to leadership development: they’re connecting people at all levels of organizations with development support when and where it’s needed.
This means first supporting people to ‘learn how to learn’ so they can approach development in a self-directed way, then connecting them with access to tools and shared wisdom to ‘pull’ what they need on demand. At Adeption we bring this to life through our ‘Be Conscious, Be Curious, Be Better’ learning methodology, and through the AI capabilities of our digital platform. The platform recommends the most relevant leadership frameworks for their challenges, as well as insights from people in the same organisation who have worked through similar challenges. This is a significant shift away from delivering predetermined content, to development grounded in current, real-world challenges.
This ‘unprogram’ approach enables leadership development to go beyond a one-off program, to support people in a continuous development journey woven into their day-to-day work. This is essential to meeting the complex, adaptive challenges we’re all facing today that require us to constantly learn. And it’s essential to organisations being agile and staying relevant into the future.
Jamie McIver is General Manager of Adeption Australia. Curious to learn more about Adeption’s approach to leadership development? Reach out to Jamie directly by emailing jamiem@adeption.io