Leadership Development Is A $366 Billion Industry: Here’s Why Most Programs Don’t Work. Chris Westfall wrote this article published on June 20, 2019, at Forbes.com, citing data provided by McKinsey. He refers to the data as “a startling insight into the leadership industry: most of these leadership programs fail to create desired results.”
I was an HR leader in lean organizations for twenty-two years, with seven of those years at the executive level working with the president in a large public company. I don’t know about you, but this data is neither startling nor insightful. I saw it, heard it, and had to compensate for ineffective leadership almost daily, even as millions of dollars were spent developing leaders.
In the article, Chris shares, “The McKinsey study points to mindset as perhaps the most dangerous enemy of successful leadership training programs.” I couldn’t agree more that “Leadership comes from one place, and one place only: inside of you.” If your mindset doesn’t support the new behaviors learned, ultimately, your mindset will trump your behaviors, and you won’t be able to get the results or sustain the change you want. If programs don’t address leadership values and assumptions, organizations won’t realize the results high-performance teams practicing mutual learning can achieve. High-performance teams require different thinking and different actions from leaders.