57. The Problem with Your Leadership Development Program with Dr Darja Kragt and Prina Shah

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with myself, Preena Shah. This episode is a really good one. Get comfy and let's do this. Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change Your Workplace with myself, Priena Shah. And I'm really excited to welcome Dr. Daria Krack to us today. And I've got a bit of an intro to you, Daria, before we kick off, if I may. Sure. So Dr. Daria Krackt is a leadership scientist. She's a lecturer in work psychology and a founder of the Leading Lab. She's passionate about helping individuals and organizations to develop more effective and inclusive leadership. Dr. Daria has designed and facilitated dozens of leadership development workshops and programs for professionals, MBAs, and executives in Australia and Europe. She works globally. And I came across Daria a long time ago. We're both living and working in Perth, and I love what she does. And a while ago, Daria posted something on LinkedIn which I thought, lady, I need to talk to you about this. Daria, I want to talk to you about that juicy topic. And the topic being the problem with organizations' leadership development programs. Daria, first off, welcome. Hello, how are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me here. I'm so excited to talk about this huge thing on leadership development and organizations.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Absolutely. Daria, before we begin, can you tell us a little bit about you and why you do what you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Great. So I've been studying or researching leadership development for over 10 years now. And my research actually kicked off from a very pivotal point, one of those conversations that you remember, and that kind of changes your life almost, right? So the conversation I've had more than 10 years ago now was with these students that I was uh in master's program that I was teaching at the time, and they were all young professionals, ready to go into the workplace, ready to become entry-level management supervisory positions, and they were taking this unit on leadership. And I was the tutor, and we had this particular discussion on leadership and what it means to be a leader, and suddenly they start going around the room and saying, No, I'm not a leader yet. I don't see myself as a leader. And I said, Well, hang on, like what's going on there? Like, you're obviously ready to start doing these leadership things in the workplace. And they said something like, leader is someone who's uh a fortune 500 CEO or a prominent politician, and until you get there in that really power position, you're not a leader. And I went, Well, I really disagree with that, and I always have. I don't even know why. I kind of always perceive leadership as be something that everyone has already. And I obviously got into this pretty big discussion with those uh students at the time, but also from that, I developed the whole idea for my research, is essentially trying to answer the question. So, why is it and how do people come to see themselves as leaders? Which is something that we call leadership identity in research, right? So this is the self-perception. And then I've conducted a number of studies, which is intervention studies, meaning that we designed leadership trainings and development programs, and being researchers then collected a bunch of data through those programs, so over time, and always that sort of purpose of trying to see like what is it that helps people to really kind of solidify and continue to develop this self-perception. We and also show that it's super critical, like it's so important. If you don't see yourself as a leader, you're not going to be as effective, you're not going to be investing in opportunities for you know further development and training, other people are not gonna see you as a leader. We've shown a lot of these sort of effects in research.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Oh my gosh, I have so many questions for you. And when you were talking, I was writing, so I'm a writer, I love writing. So, Daria, our definition of leadership is one thing that we need to work on for ourselves. I am completely with you. I think everyone in the workplace is a leader, and it's the mentality that you have, it's not that hierarchical appointed position. It's well, I'm a specialist in this, therefore, I'm a leader in this.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

And leadership identity is such an interesting topic itself, Daria. Like yourself, I have supported many an organization with their leadership development programs, yourself as well. And that's one area that I want to get into. So let's start there then. So, leadership development programs. You wrote a wonderful, wonderful post on LinkedIn about the problem with leadership development programs. I'm seeing problem number one. I, as a cohort of the program, might not classify myself as a leader, first off. That might be a problem. But before we even go into that as a topic or as a conversation point, high level, from your perspective, Daria, what are the problems with leadership development programs? I know there are many, and I've got lots of ideas as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

Exactly. Where do we start, right? But I think fundamentally, let's start with one of the key things, right? That really aligns with what we were just talking about, this idea that everyone is a leader. So for decades now, we have an approach to organizational leadership development basically operates on this idea of high potential. Yes, right? So that somehow, so the assumption there is that somehow there's a group of people in organization that innately have a higher level of leadership capacity or capability or are more suited to leadership roles. And what we have seen time and time again, and this is across practice and research, right? Because I live in both worlds, across practice and we've seen this idea didn't really prove itself, right? This assumption that somehow there's a group of people that we have to select and then we have to focus on investing in them and only develop then, and this is going to be our leadership pipeline. Like this fails miserably, right? So the statistic I think uh that I pulled out from some other research done by the big consultancies is that something like close to 70% of organizations don't have a leadership pipeline that they can trust and rely on, right? So clearly something is not lining up there. And I think from what I've just said earlier about my research and my kind of the big belief in the leadership space is that we have to scrap that idea of high potential. We have to see everyone in our organization as a potential leader. Yeah, we have to give opportunities to everyone in our organizations to show themselves, to prove themselves, to develop themselves and to step up. And then suddenly you have a much larger pool of potential leaders. You have much larger pools of people who are dedicated, engaged, who are really into their work, because we know that development opportunities are those that people really value. So employees see development opportunities, learning opportunities as something that is a perk, right? They see it as something extra. So when you provide that extra to your employees, they will actually be more engaged with your organization. So even before they get into the leadership sort of space, they already are reaping benefits of development for everyone, right? And finally, and there's probably a lot more you could say that, but finally, the key point there is by getting rid of this high potential idea, what it means is that we are essentially making leadership development more inclusive and more fair. Because traditionally, as much as we don't like to talk about it, the high potential selection is very biased. The persons who are designated as high potentials are actually selected based on who they know, who they like, who likes them, how powerful their manager is in sort of lobbying for their selection, and all of those sort of things that we all know about and we don't want to talk about, right? So by saying, hey, we actually see everyone as a potential, that gives great opportunities for diversity because suddenly it's everyone, it's women, it's minorities, it's people who don't have a strong political skill set, it's you know, it's everyone, like it's literally everyone in your organization.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

100% is the introverts, it's the people who, you know, shy away. That yay, because we just don't know. Absolutely. Daria, you have just burst the bubble on succession management 101, let's just say, and people listening to this are gonna be thinking, what the hell? But you're completely right in relation to that talent management aspect of picking and choosing high potentials. It really is on who you know and who often is the loudest in the workplace and who shines the most, so you know, the most charismatic, so to speak. And those are the people obviously the stand out in any workplace or any society or any culture that we're in. And you question how suitable they may be in the long run, in the respect that you're talking to. Darry, I've got a really good example. I was speaking with a CEO last week, in fact, amazing, you know, at the apex of his career, this is his final job. And I was asking him what kind of legacy he wants to leave. I was asking him all of these big questions, and one of the things he said to me, just in his soft, calm voice, is Prina, can I tell you, when I became a leader, when I became a CEO or a general manager at that position, I didn't want to be one. I was asked to be it on that leadership development program through the succession planning. So he is an amazing CEO, absolutely, thanks to all of the success he's had through all of the development he's had. However, it's been imposed upon him. And imagine he's still amazing, but imagine someone that that hasn't been imposed upon, and someone who has that internal drive, not saying that he doesn't have that internal drive, but just the difference in opening the opportunity from that inclusivity perspective versus you are the appointed one. What a difference that would make to an organization and to the legacy that people also leave, Daria, in that respect.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

Yeah, absolutely. And the conversation about a high potential program the other week with some organization, and their problem was that they went through a selection process last year trying to identify their high potential talent, right? Yeah, had a lot of problems with even trying to define what that means within their organization. How do we select these people? Then ended up somehow selecting 17 people, and 12 months later they have four left.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

People move on. That's the other thing. When you pick high potentials or so-called high potentials that we lay people.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Yeah, and now you start, you know, now they start to do it again, you know. And I was like, Well, how often are you gonna do this every year now? You know, why not democratize the idea? Why not think about how can we offer these same opportunities but to much larger pool of people, you know, instead of spending and wasting resources and trying to run the selection process, which is timely and costly in itself, how can we maybe take those resources and instead invest them in something that gives more opportunities to more people?

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Absolutely. So you talked about development as a perk, definitely so. And it is seen as a perk when it's offered in the right manner. So I've often seen going back to these leadership development programs, if they are imposed upon people, it's a real different uptake and it's a real different level of engagement as well. So I've like yourself, I've delivered a number of leadership development programs, and there's such a difference in the audience in terms of everything that they love and take on if they have been voluntarily put onto the program versus no, Daria, you have to do this program because people are busy as well. You know, there's so much happening within the work day that imposing a leadership development program on people may not be the way. So democratizing it, I love the word that you use there. A lot of people listening into us, Daria, now are probably gonna be freaking out about oh my gosh, well, if we open up this leadership development program to masses, they're gonna be thinking about money and this is gonna cost a bomb and all of that. But in relation to that, I've got some ideas about how it can be affordable and accessible to many. Do you have any thoughts on that yourself, Daria?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Yeah, I think absolutely. I think the first objection you hear was this idea is that how are we gonna be able to afford something like this, right? But the beauty of leadership development is it doesn't necessarily need to be the grand big program with all these bangs and whistles for everyone, right? Like it would be great, obviously. It would be great if everyone had access to big things, but it can be small things, it can be just the core curriculum. What I love, I love this idea of core leadership curriculum, something that is like just very kind of basic key competencies, key skills, and that can be delivered using self-paced and types of engagement where it's already pre-recorded, so you're you know, marginal costs and rolling it out, and then followed up by group discussion. And realistically, this should be almost facilitated by like existing leaders themselves. Not all of them will have the capacity and skill set for that, but it could be in terms of mentoring kind of arrangement, right? Or group mentoring arrangement, or peer mentoring works beautifully, right? Like I always introduce the peer mentoring into a lot of my units and courses, and especially within the university ones, you know, we say, well, okay, you're set up with a buddy for the duration of this leadership course, and you are going to be working on the activities together and having these conversations. And the beautiful thing about it is a lot of people just stay in touch like three, five, seven years later, and continue to be peer mentors and like kind of accountability partners for one another, right? So things like that that can be introduced within organizations and how many different options we have now. It's beauty of technology and all sorts of things that allow people to have access and then from there start thinking about who is showing the motivation to once more, and then how maybe we can send them to an external course. Maybe we can do like a level up course for like a smaller group of people, but still keeping it fairly kind of large in the sense of how many people we touch. And the other important thing is that workshops and training and things like that, they're actually only a small part of leadership development. That's only your main kind of knowledge gaining vehicles. That's where you learn, where you get the knowledge, that's where you get that new ideas. But big part of it is what you do on your job. So on the job learning and thinking about how we can introduce some job challenges or stretch challenges into the existing work, right? That will allow individuals to apply that skill set and uh continue their development in the context of their actual job. So things like, hey, we have a new project, might be a small project, you know, if we're talking about really junior people, a small project, we need someone to lead the project. Think that you can step up and take on this extra responsibility. The great opportunity for leadership learning, pair it up with some form of reflection, be it self-reflection or coach-led reflection, coaching, or there's even now platforms that offer like automated coaching or AI coaching, so something, right? And yes, I think the beauty of it is when you break that mindset that leadership development is only for exclusive group of people, that it's very costly, very time consuming, very rich, which is great. But if you break that mindset and we start looking out of that box, there's so much that we can offer, and we can tailor that to people, right? Which is going to be the next point.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

Absolutely. That's brilliant. You've talked to so much here. I love the aspect of using your internal leaders already in that peer mentoring aspect that breaks silos, it builds the culture, and you know, the larger the organization, the even more important that is. Daria, I love the way that you outline a foundation for all, let's say. And that's using technology as our friend because it really is a practical example for you, Daria. Two years ago, COVID happened. So during that time, I helped one client still run their leadership development program. We developed everything on video, so leaders will learn at their own pace through video, and then we met after that for group coaching. So then that's really meaningful. So you learn at your own pace, and we're all different learners as well. So the other aspect also is considering the way you teach your students within your workforce as well. Visually, auditory learners, you can often now, I'm really talking to a lot of organizations about learning through private podcast, Daria. People can go for a walk and learn, you know. This podcast, for example, Daria, has been used by so many people from a learning perspective. So they throw lunch and learn, listen to the podcast, or look at the video, and take notes and share the love with each other in that respect as well. So we can learn through so many different mediums and make it accessible to more of the workforce, it is completely doable from that perspective. And then you talked about so we've got that foundation level of everyone learns the same way. So we are learning the organization's way. And one thing that's often missing, Daria, when I go into organizations which have problems or toxic culture problems, is that there's no foundation level or foundation understanding of how we all should be behaving, working, leading, managing. That's often the missing piece. So you're really meeting that need immediately from the get-go. We value you, and this is what we expect of you as well. So it's a two-way process.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Yeah, at the moment, where we have this really crazy market in terms of like a labor market, where like attraction is a real problem and retention is a real problem. Yeah. Solution to both of those problems is development. Because you could imagine where like you offer development to existing employees that becomes that sort of perk, and like they see there's a whole organization that she cares about me and thinks about me and about my professional development. But for the new highest, you could almost put it in the job ad or as part of your interview, right? If you join us, you are gonna go maybe not straight in, but within the first months, we're gonna start putting in the developmental opportunities. Yeah, and who else offers that? Like, great, if I want that sort of development, and a lot of people do, yeah, and that's another misconception is that this misconception that somehow people just don't want to develop as you know, leaders and professionally. Well, that's not true. A lot of people want to grow and they do understand that they need to grow, and they do realize that they are not perfect leaders or maybe even really good ones, they know it, but how do I fix it? What do I actually do? And like when you can tap into that and say, Well, we're gonna help you, that is gonna be of huge value, right? So, development has so many benefits, even outside of the core purpose of developing leaders, right? It has like these ripple effects on the entire organization in all sorts of different ways.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Yeah, such positive ways, Daria. Okay, another problem about leadership development programs, I want to talk to. So I have an issue with leadership development programs in that you have the appointed few high potentials who are put onto the program. But often these people haven't even been taught basic management skills, and that's a massive missing piece, I find. So often when I'm talking with organizations, like, yeah, you've got these wonderful high potentials, but can they do the basics of having a difficult conversation with their staff? Can they hold one-to-ones? Can they manage their own time? Often with organizations, when I do speak to them about their leadership development programs, I do step back a little bit and ask them those curly questions as to, well, can they do the basics of management? Because one thing I've seen when leaders do fail is because they haven't been given the appropriate resources and development to train them in the basics of day-to-day management. What's your perspective on that?

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Look, the ongoing discussion around what constitutes management and leadership and where is the line? I think, you know, we're not gonna solve this in the space of everyone has their opinion on it. I personally think that management is absolutely a critical foundation for leadership. As you say, you have to get the basics right. Time management, task management, making sure that things are actually being done on time for yourself and for your team, and all of that stuff. And before you can really become inspirational, motivational, you know, transformational, inclusive, whatever. All of those, you have to have your basic management or Teamwork there, or you know, transactional leadership. There's a lot of different terms, but that foundation, conflict, resolving conflicts, you know, negotiating. There's so many of those skills. And even just a large area of struggle for middle management is being sandwiched in between your high executives and your employees. And a lot of them feel like they're being essentially squeezed, you know, from both bottom and the top continuously. And so there's very little development in that space. How do you manage that pressure from the top, pressure from the bottom and being in the middle and taking hits from both? How do you manage that? How do you deal with that? Because it's really, really hard, right? And before you go and start, you know, transformational, inspirational, all of those great big words that we have out there, you have to make sure that you even have space for that. And you don't have space for that if you're being sandwiched and you don't know what to do about that constant pressure, right? So influence, basic influencing skills, which is about you know downward influence, is very common because that's where like leader towards employees. But what about influence on the peer level? What about upward influence? How do you influence your own boss as a middle manager? You're a leader and a follower at the same time. Yeah. Because you have a boss and you have followers. So that sort of dynamic, you almost can see like a ladder of kind of development there, right? That's probably not a basic skill set anymore, but it's still needed before you even get to that sort of the big leadership stuff.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

100%. Absolutely. So while we're talking about this then, Daria, another question for you, or another issue with leadership development programs, is that often they are designed primarily by either the HR team or the organizational development or learning development team, and you know, with some input from the executive. And let's just say that I've been internal, I've been then done that myself. Often these OD people, learning and development people, HR people follow whatever's sexy at the moment and what others are doing, rather than actually looking at what's needed from their organization and their perspective and linking it to their strategic direction and the gaps and all of that kind of stuff. And in what you wrote, the thing that really struck out to me, you talk about the aspect of self-assessment and co-design. Can you tell us a little bit more about that in relation to these leadership development programs and the importance of them with engaging with the cohort?

SPEAKER_01 24:36

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for bringing it up because that's definitely something that I'm extremely passionate about, is as a researcher, right? So the research in doing these interventions, right? So I see them from the lenses of every leadership development, be training, self-paced course, workshop, whatever it is, is an intervention. In order to know if the intervention is working, we need to collect data. And the data is not just your event evaluation type of questionnaires, which is essentially your did you like this training? Well, of course I did, because I was away from my work desk and I got fed. So amazing. Give me more of this, right? So obviously I'm generalizing a little bit and simplifying it, but essentially that's what we get in that sort of effective type of feedback, right? Yeah. So we need to know if people are learning, we need to know if people are changing their behavior as a result of the program. We need to know if changing that behavior is producing the results that the organization actually intends to see from the program. Now, here comes the first problem with this. How many organizations are thinking about what results specifically they're wanting to generate by introducing an intervention? Very few, right? So the first thing where, like, no matter who's designing the program, no matter who's the internal, external, doesn't matter. The first thing, what do we actually want to achieve here? Yes. And the beauty of that is that once you have a list of those intended outcomes that are more or less properly defined in a way that is testable, so like as a hypothesis testable type of stuff, right? Then you can use them to build evaluations and the data collection approaches. Because now we know what we're trying to achieve, we know what we're trying to measure, so we just need to figure out how we are going to measure. That's an easy bit, because the hard bit is actually deciding what are we trying to measure, right? So self-assessment comes into that because then knowing what we're trying to achieve, what are the say core competencies or the skill sets that we're targeting with this intervention or the program, then we can introduce a self-assessment to know where the people are at, where are the managers or leaders, or even like people who are not yet in leadership positions in terms of their level of competence or skill on those specific dimensions, right? Yeah. And then from there, once they go into the intervention, we can start tracking their developments, so essentially reassessing them and also collecting that additional data on those intended outcomes. So, for example, I worked on evaluation of a large program for public servants, and they're intended, like they said the outcome. We want more empowered teams. So we want leaders to become more empowering, like embrace the empowering leadership. This was a few years ago, empowering leadership was sort of the thing. I feel like now it's not anymore, but the title changes them, you know. And so say, okay, great. So, what do we need to do in order to measure that outcome? Are the teams becoming more empowered? Do they feel more empowered? We need to measure the perception of the team members. We need to go to them before the program, during the program, after the program. About, I think we did about four months after the program, because it probably takes a while to build up that sort of change. Um, so we measured their perception of how empowered empowering the leader was, and also their internal sort of like a team climate type of thing, which is what that empowerment should be affecting. And then from the leader's side, we measured how their competencies in empowering and how empowered they feel themselves. And we did that, I think the program was maybe four or six months long. So we did that at intervals throughout the entire program, and also with that follow-up, which is four months after. As a result, we had all of these great data points that you can then start looking at. Like, yeah, leaders are actually developing their competence in being more empowering. Yes, their people are starting to see that in action, they're actually starting to feel though and see those behaviors. And yes, there is a change, a small one, but it doesn't change quickly in terms of the team climate and those sort of psychological outcomes that we were trying to capture. And we can then sit down and say, you know what, there was an impact from this program, and it was aligned with the intention, the intended outcome.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Yes. And that's so, so often, most of the time, the missing piece, diaria. And there's a lot of leadership development programs which are highly theoretical and very sexy, you know. So, like you said, you go out, you have a wonderful lunch, and then you come back, and it's like, yeah, I learned something, and then what? Lacking that practical application, and you talked about it earlier. What are the challenges within the organizations that you have that the leadership development cohort can actually apply their learning to? Or this, not longitudinal study, but semi, you know, six months. You really studied the impact of that leader and what they learned on the team. How genius was that? But because of the fact that early on you said, so what are the outcomes that we need? What are the outcomes that we want? Daria, the other problem I have with leadership development programs is that organizations often get very stuck with the psychometric tools or culture change tools that they use. So, from my experience, Daria, I'm accredited in a tool called Print, the Y of You, uh, Human Synergistics, that's another culture survey tool, and then Disc Advanced. And I found that organizations that use these tools, they're wonderful. They've got the best of intentions, however, they can hang on to the tool too much rather than having their own flavor or their own way of this is our way. So I'll give you an example. Last week I was asked to respond to a quote for a leadership development program for a beautiful organization using a tool. And I had that conversation with the CEO saying, Well, do you want to be led by the tool for your culture change and leadership development? Or do you want to create your way? There's a difference. Organizations can be too wedded to these tools, and then within the workplace, people have that language, which is not the workplace's language, it's the tools' language. So using human synergistics, oh, you're too red, you're too blue, you're too this, you're too that. It just loses the purpose of their identities. Early on, you were talking about leadership identity, that's just gone. When you rely so much on a tool. Do you have thoughts on that as well? And the risks, the benefits, the pros and cons of using tools and reliance on them, Daria.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

Look, I think tools are wonderful when they're used for the purposes they're intended for. That's one thing. And second is when they align with that larger why that I've talked about already. So I think first thing first, let's figure out what do we actually want to accomplish here? What is our strategy, right? Like what is the strategic level thinking around our leadership development? From there, you can start putting the puzzle together. So, what tools do we need? What assessments do we need that align with our intended kind of uh strategy and our intended outcomes? Are the tools going to be helpful to achieving that purpose or that strategic outcome? Or are they actually gonna, what you're talking about, defer us in, put us on a different pathway and actually take us away from where we're trying to go? And it's a really hard conversation and it's not happening for a good reason. Well, you need a good facilitator to facilitate that conversation, right? Because I've had experience going into organizations saying they have a competency framework. Great, great competency framework, also a tool, essentially, right? Because it defines the behaviors, it tells you what the dimensions are, what the behavior looks like, da-da-da-da-da. Great. They have no idea what to do with it. So, how do we actually use it on in developmental sense? Like, how do we actually help leaders to become more proficient in the competencies? And so we use this co-design approach, or I use this co-design approach that we we've talked about earlier, you mentioned earlier, where I conducted actual interviews with people in those leadership positions, sitting down and going through the competencies and saying, Hey, can you give me an example of where you would think that this competency was demonstrated? Can you give me an actual real life example of a leader in your organization where do you think they demonstrated or didn't demonstrate? Because it's equally as important that it was present or it was there or it was not there, and it should have been, right? And then we, you know, I collected this qualitative data, right? So, like pages and pages and pages of interview transcripts, and from that uh was able to deduce the example-led behavioral descriptors of competencies, because they already had behavioral descriptors for the competencies, but these were like specific contextualized examples of this happened, and this is how that person demonstrated that competency, and that is so much easier than to start for people to understand to actually okay, yep, it clicks now. Now I understand what it actually means to demonstrate this competency, whatever it might be, right? And it also becomes so much easier to use in developmental contexts because you have examples that you can work with, you can discuss them, you can discuss the you know different ways of approaching the same scenario and why it can be more or less effective in the beautiful world of all sorts of things that we can do. But that groundwork is really time consuming, yes, is really hard, and you have to have a person who knows what they're doing. Because we're talking about qualitative research here, right? That's essentially qualitative research, and as any other research, as snobby as it might sound from me, you have to have a skill set in research, and that doesn't come as a given, even with your university degree, even if you did a stats course at uni, doesn't mean that you know how to do research.

SPEAKER_00 35:09

Absolutely, it's asking the right questions, Daria. And from this example that you've given, it sounds like you really got to the true DNA of the organization. So yes, they have their competencies and you know, whatever outlined. That's often a sexy piece of paper that's you know on a poster, but you really delved into the detail of well, what does that actually mean for you as an organization in terms of yes behavior and no behavior as well? Yeah, that's when leaders, that's when people on the ground, the workforce actually start to understand this HR lingo because often, you know, these things are so far from plain English. Yeah, and that really Darius reminded me of an example, organizational values. Wonderful. You know, they're often these big, big statements, but often they haven't been broken down at that level as well, as to well, what does this value mean in relation to our behavior, in relation to we will and we won't statements as well? And you know, then you can link that to your leadership development program as well, if it's a values-based leadership development program. So amazing, amazing. You have given so many thought points. What are your thoughts in relation to leadership development programs being imposed on the high potentials? You talked about it earlier, but I talked about delivering programs when it's been imposed on people versus when they've been asked if they're interested. Your thoughts in relation to that, Daria?

SPEAKER_01 36:36

Look, this question about voluntary participation or non-voluntary essentially is a really tough one because there's pros and cons to both, and it's not really quite sort of one size fits all type of approach. So, for example, like the latest research evidence we have on this specific questions comes from a meta-analysis of leadership development interventions, was conducted uh uh five years ago now. So we're due for a new one, and I think there's one already in in the work somewhere, like it will be published there sort of in the next. But for now, that's our latest piece of evidence. And they analyzed something like 300, over 300 original studies. So this combined pool sample size is huge. It's hundreds of thousands of people through different interventions, right? And they looked at a number of different components in design of leadership development, and one of them was this idea of voluntary versus non-voluntary participation. Now, the funniest thing that they found is that when it's voluntary participation, something like learning outcomes are stronger. So people learn more when they're voluntarily coming into the program and wanting to essentially be there, so self-selected being there. But when we look at something like behavioral change, surprisingly, the non-voluntary participation was strongerly related to behavioral change. So, in plain language, you know, they saw more of a change in the behavior when people were um well imposed, probably, you know, but you know, there was an element of you have to do this or you have to go on this program, which is peculiar, right? You would expect that would be more behavior change if people really want to be there so voluntarily. But I think some of this to me ties back into this idea of where does behavior change really happen? It happens out of the comfort zone, right? Yes. If you want to be there and you're curious and you're motivated, absolutely, but you can get stuck in that comfort zone still, you can learn a lot, but it doesn't challenge you enough to what you talked about earlier to go and change something about the way that you do things. When you're dragged into there, right? So it's extreme example, but you're dragged into there and you say, you have to do this, you have to sit through this. I mean, two things can happen. You become completely disengaged, and you just sit back and look on your phone the entire day. And we've all had those participants in our workshops, right? That and they're lost souls, like you know, like okay, sure, like you completely. But the people who kind of end up there and are still engaged in that, they end up being more in out of their comfort zone because in the first place, they already kind of are a bit, you know, oh, I don't really want to be here, but you know, okay, I'm here now, so might as well just pay attention. And that might be one of the mechanisms by which we we actually see more of behavioral change in the non-voluntary participation samples. But look, this is all speculation. As I said, we're due for another big review to come out in the next, I would say, six to twelve months. That's how academic cycle works. Yeah, and it would be really interesting to see if you know, um, well, if they look into that first and second, if they find anything different. But yeah, I wish I could say it always should be voluntary or it should always be involuntary, but unfortunately, again, it comes back to like what are we trying to actually achieve here? Yeah, if it's just for learning purposes, lunch and learn type of sessions, absolutely, they have to be voluntary because we know that you know, otherwise, people think you can't force people, you know, sort of. Yeah, if it's more strategically aligned, behavioral change intervention, there is a component of we need you people to actually be there and do it. Yeah, even if you maybe are not super keen, not jumping out straight and saying, Brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 40:36

People learn differently as well. That's something we haven't covered on in relation to the issue with leadership development programs. They usually, you know, vanilla, this is the product that you get in terms of the courses and delivery and all of that. But we learn in different ways, and some people take longer than others. Do you have thoughts on that as well?

SPEAKER_01 40:59

Well, it comes back to you know, your basic learning design, which again is a skill set, right? So, for a long time in you know, higher education, this this has always you know been known for the last, I don't know, decades that you can't just use one mode of delivery, right? So you have to combine, and hence, you know, nowadays with technology, we have, as you said, you could listen, you could watch and listen, you could read a transcript if if that's really your jam. And at university, we try to incorporate all of those different ways of modes of learning and group work. And I think that should be true for the leadership programs as well, but also having even more, I guess, potential customization based on that self-assessment piece. So knowing, oh, actually, like this person is scoring really low in this particular area. Yeah, how can we help this particular person customize a program a little bit more for them? So it can look like you know, some a core program, which is the same for everyone, right? Like it's the same, same foundational skills, you know, foundational type of knowledge, learning, building knowledge type of component. But then that's where things like coaching or mentoring or peer mentoring or job assignments or challenges or like whatever comes in where you know that you're targeting a specific kind of learning gap or area of development for that particular person, hence comes back to the assessment and the data and having that data. Yeah, so it's all interlinked, all of these pieces they actually fall onto one another and fit with one another quite nicely.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Daria, I feel like I could talk to you forever, but I have one final question for you. So, my final question to you is if I was to hand you a magic wand, what is one way you would change the way of the workplace, Daria?

SPEAKER_01 42:54

Oh gosh. Um, one way I would yeah, I I would definitely want people to understand more importance of that strategic alignment of development and that piece. All of this could start with that big why question of why we're doing this, what are we trying to achieve? I think the in just from that thing alone, we could see incredible improvement in the way that we approach leadership development. So, yeah, my magical one would be like if you're trying to do anything in the leadership development space, or quite frankly, any space, but let's stick with the leadership development space, is that you absolutely cannot get to do anything before you sit down and have a conversation about the why.

SPEAKER_00 43:40

Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time, Daria.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Thanks so much, Brina, for having me. It was lovely to chat to you.

SPEAKER_00 43:47

If you want to meet great thinkers who stand against crappy workplace cultures, lousy leaders, and toxic teams, then you need to join the Ways to Change Your Workplace Facebook group, which is linked in today's show notes. I will see you in the next episode. Bye for now.