Ingram's April 2024

Leadership Training That Works

It starts with developing the talent that will extend your “reach” across the enterprise.

by Dennis Boone

Author and leadership-develop ment guru Matt Tenney, writing for Business Leadership Today.com, notes that organizations around the world spend a combined $60 billion a year on leadership development. The ROI on that spend? A 28 per cent increase in critical leadership abilities—however that’s measured— and a 20 percent pop in the more metric-friendly category of perfor mance improvement. If those don’t strike you as rea

sonable returns on investments of that scale, you can look to a number of factors for sub-par dividends. Tenney is not alone among leader ship development experts who say one of the biggest factors limiting the ef fectiveness of those efforts is that the training many people receive simply hasn’t been designed to align with an organization’s strategic goals. Generic leadership instruction is fine as far as it goes, but if, say, being an elite-lev el communicator doesn’t help a man

ufacturer produce better, lower-cost widgets more efficiently and effective ly than its competitors, that training investment might have been better spent on an equipment upgrade. Guidance on building effective leadership training is as ubiquitous today as self-help books on finding peace of mind, losing weight, or deal ing with teenage children. But if you go through enough of it, you’ll find some universal themes that can ap ply to any business. For starters:

Focus on outcomes.

Lighten up on the Theory.

For law firms, that might be producing more billable hours; for battery plants, it might be raising annual output at low er costs; for hospitals, it might be improved marks on pa tient-satisfaction surveys. The point is that your business has unique strategic needs that set it apart from every other one out there—even direct competitors in the same space. Tailor your development efforts to produce leaders who have the skills to improve your odds of reaching those strategic goals.

Too often, theoretical principles are over-emphasized with off-the-shelf programs for developing leaders. Of course, they are: like any business, the developers are interested in selling more programming at the lowest production cost. They are not tailored to your company’s unique mission or interests, so they may come up short on real-world applications. Shop for the instructional models that will clearly advance your organizational goals.

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April 2024

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