Getting Leader

Development Right:
Competence Not
Competencies
Prepared to: DR.
ARIK PRASETYA,SOS,M,SI,PHD

Leader development is not working.

Witness the corporate crises du
jour,for example, at Disney, AOL
Time Warner, Morgan Stanley.
Beneath the surface of each is a
failure of leadership.

A typical contemporary leadership development

approach begins with an elaborate (expensive and
time-consuming) process of identifying
competencies believed to characterize effective
leaders. These competencies provide a basis for
developing human resource (HR) programs,
especially training programs, intended to develop
the competencies.

As appealing and logical as the

competency approach may be,
the emphasis is misplaced. The
focus instead should be on using
experiences to develop
competence, rather than on
preconceived competencies that
may not have anything to do with
effective leadership. We believe a
more effective approach would:

Identify strategically relevant leadership challenges, not a list of

individual competencies

Use the strategic challenges to identify critical developmental

experiences, not as the rationale for competency models that drive
training and HR programs

Identify people who can make the most of the experiences offered,
not those who already can do what the experiences could teach

Find ways to get people into the experiences they need, rather
than just selecting people for jobs or sending them to training
programs

Help people learn from their experiences rather than let them sink
or swim

Why Leader Development isnt Working

The real reason leader development is not

working is that it has the wrong focus

It has focused on competencies rather than on

results.
Executive culture and language is about business
results and financialsleader development is
instead tied to a short list of knowledge, skills,
attitudes, abilities that are theoretically necessary
to be an effective leader. Sold as a common
language and as the first step in developing and
validating a company-tailored leadership model,
the competency lists look remarkably similar from
organization to organization.

When we sat in on the developmental staffing

discussions of the CEO and his team in a large
high-tech company, we found exactly thatthe
language of the executive suite was competence,
demonstrated by experience, results, and
capabilities, not competencies. Here is the
language of a real-life top team:

The customers bring up his name to me.

Its a tough job dealing with [a major customer] day in

and day out, and shes done a fabulous job.

He is relentless in cutting cost out and he will deliver.

Hes a general business guy but he has the engineers

respect.

Hes technically excellent and builds a team beyond

belief.

What Companies Could be Doing

Although experience is clearly the principal school

for leadership, the bad marriage to the
competency approach is perversely strong. Its
logical appeal and usefulness in creating the
appearance of integrated processes and systems
apparently compensates, in the minds of many,
for its ineffectiveness in actually developing
leadership talent. Simply paying attention to
development by creating competency lists and
doing something by offering programs and
processes masks the fundamental fallacy of the
approach.

Identify Challenges, Not Competencies

Where do executives learn how to deal with these

kinds of challenges? Through experience. What
experiences? Step 1 in leader development should
be identifying the leadership challenges that the
strategy will create. It is then possible to talk
about the kinds of experiences that a talented
person might need to prepare him or her for those
challenges.

using the business strategy to identify the

important developmental opportunities is the
crucial link. Trying to identify a list of
competencies that top executives should have is a
distraction from the true task, which is developing
competence through experience.

Identify Experiences, Not Programs

The good news is that experience is available

every day to everyone. The bad news is that using
experience effectively to develop executive talent
is not as straightforward as offering training
programs.

It is not the first priority of a business to develop

people, so critical business needs may dictate
giving jobs to proven players rather than to the
people who might develop the most from having
them. Furthermore, there is no science to dictate
how to use specific experiences to develop
specific skills in specific people at the right time.

For all these reasons, using experience rather

than programs to drive the development process
is itself a challenging proposition.

Identify People Who Can Make the Most of the

Experiences Offered

If the goal is to use experience to develop

competent executives rather than to develop
executive competencies, then the challenge is to
identify those people who will learn the most from
the experiences they are offered. Adult learning is
seldom very predictable, and it takes time. If it
takes 10 years to become a master chess player,
then leadership mastery would require at least as
much investment in learning.

Create Mechanisms for Getting People into the

Experiences They Need

But many powerful developmental opportunities

require that a boundary be crossed in order to get
the person needing the experience into itseveral
managers must cooperate. It is no small challenge
to pull this off, and the most common process
used to determine who gets what job is
succession planning.

Help People Learn from the Experiences They

Have

Experience may be the best teacher, but our

understanding of how it teaches leaves much to
be desired. The fickle nature of experience has
spawned aphorisms, such as Some people have
20 years of experience while others have one year
of experience 20 times.

The Essential Role of the

Developmental Leader

The most important external factor in a managers

learning from job experience is the immediate
boss. Our research has demonstrated that the
boss is across the board the most important factor
in developing executives. There is more, however,
to being a developmental boss than modeling
best practices, mentoring, and coaching. We
identify two things, one intentional and one that
takes place as a by-product of effective
leadership.

What do we know about what, when, where,

how, and why leaders develop?

The work is challenging. It stretches our limits, it

may be a sprint or a marathon, but it is no walk
in the park. There is lots of ambiguity; we feel we
are operating in uncharted waters, on the edge.

There are clear goals and direction. People know

what is expected of them. The expectations may
be broad (solve the problem, open a plant) or
narrow (ship 40 percent more boxes with no
errors), but people know what has to get done.

People are held accountable. Sometimes the

accountability is implicit, such as the self-imposed
pressure to succeed in the eyes of ones peers;
sometimes it is more explicit, when performance,
both good and bad, has consequences, and
everybody knows what they are.

There is emotion in the organization. People learn

and remember when ideas and feelings happen
together. There may be ups and downs, high
points and low, but engaged organizations are
seldom boring.

The Role of Executive Coaching

The range of leadership development
interventions continues to expand, limited only by
the imagination of HR people. Examples include
360 feedback, action learning problems, outdoor
exercises. Executive coaching, however, may well
be the fastest growing and now most common
practice designed specifically to help people learn
on the job.

That said, what makes coaching work? There is a

growing consensus on the essentials for an
effective executive coaching program:

Qualified coaches. Choosing an executive coach is

surprisingly similar to selecting other consultants
good coaches have credibility based on
expertise in helping executives, an understanding
of business
Targeted development. Executive coaching goes
off track when there is no clear focus for the
engagement. Coaching-experienced organizations
find that coaching gets the best results for both
the organization and the executive when the focus
is on improving performance

A partnership of effort. The individual executive,

the coach, and the organization are partners in
the effort to improve performance.

Time-limited applications. Executive coaching

works when there is a sunset clause, a defined
period (often 6 months or a year) for the
engagement. When coaching is working, there is a
tendency to extend the engagement indefinitely.

THANK YOU