How do we make leadership development safe enough

After almost 30 years working in leadership development, I know the satisfying feeling at the end of a good program.

The room has been lively. People have shared personal experiences. They leave with new insights and good intentions. The evaluation scores confirm that it worked.

Or did it?

A recent article in the Academy of Management Learning & Education by James Detert and Stephanie McKee made me return to that question. Their argument is that knowing about leadership and being able to lead differently under pressure are not the same thing.

A learning experience can go very well without much changing when the participant returns to work.

It made me think of Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle”: a temporary world within ordinary life, with its own time and rules.

A leadership program can become such a world. People step away from the daily organization into a setting where reflection is expected, experimentation is encouraged, and mistakes usually have few consequences.

Inside that circle, it may be relatively easy to give honest feedback, admit uncertainty, or try a different response.

Outside it, the old relationships, hierarchies, routines, and time pressure are still waiting. The person who listened patiently during an exercise may react quite differently when challenged unexpectedly in front of the board.

That does not make the safe learning environment artificial or unimportant. Without sufficient safety, people protect themselves rather than learn.

But Detert and McKee also ask whether leadership development sometimes makes learning too comfortable. If leaders need particular skills in stressful situations, can they develop those skills without experiencing some of that pressure while practicing?

There is no simple answer. Too little difficulty may prepare people poorly. Too much can prevent learning altogether. The authors themselves acknowledge that we still know surprisingly little about where that boundary lies.

Coaching may help bridge the two worlds. A leader brings an actual situation into the conversation, looks at what happened, considers another approach, tries it at work, and returns with the result.

Yet coaching is not automatically different. It too can become a comfortable world of reflection. A meaningful insight during a session is no guarantee that it will still be available when the pressure returns.

Because leadership is relational, the response of other people changes what happens next. Transfer is not simply a matter of reproducing a technique learned elsewhere.

Perhaps, after all these years, the question is not only whether someone learned something, but whether that learning can cross the boundary.

How do we make leadership development safe enough for people to experiment, but real enough to matter when they step back into their organization?

Source: Pedagogy of Practice: Toward Better Understanding of the Development of Leadership Skills | Academy of Management Learning & Education