Are we Starting Leader Development One Step Too Late?

(Reposted from my LinkedIn newsletter, "Words about Work" - this is the final essay in a series proposing a new way of developing leaders.)

If you’ve been following this series you’ll have picked up on the fact that I’ve been building a case for what I think is a new idea in the realm of leader development. Which is:

Leadership is fundamentally a perceptual discipline.

What leaders do matters, of course. But before behaviour comes perception.

We act on what we see. We make decisions based on what we believe is happening. We respond to our interpretation of another person's capability, motivation or intent. We navigate organizations based on our assessment of the forces at work within them. We hypothesize about the future based on what we notice changing now.

And sometimes we get it wrong.

Over the course of this series, I've explored four capacities - four lenses - through which leaders see themselves, other people, the situations around them and the wider field in which they operate.

If you’ve stayed with me to this point, the next step is a question:

If this is true, so what?

“So what?” is that if perception precedes behaviour, we may have been starting much of leadership development one step too late.

We keep trying to change what leaders do

Think about how we typically describe leadership development needs.

Delegate more effectively. Become more strategic. Listen better. Build stronger relationships. Empower your team. Increase your influence. Operate more effectively at the enterprise level.

Those are all reasonable objectives. I've worked with leaders on every one of them.

But they describe the visible behaviour. They don't necessarily tell us what is producing it. We keep trying to change what leaders do without becoming sufficiently curious about what they see.

And if that's the case, quite a lot about leadership development changes.

Feedback and coaching change

Feedback isn't simply information about what someone did and how others experienced it. At its best, it gives a leader access to something they couldn't see from their own perspective.

Coaching can do the same. Rather than jumping immediately to a better behaviour, the coach can help the leader examine the lens through which they're interpreting what is happening:

What are you noticing? What are you assuming? What have you decided is true? What else could explain what you're seeing?

Behaviour, goals and results still matter. But the developmental work precedes the decisions about actions.

Talent development changes

Organizations spend enormous effort defining the competencies required for leadership at different levels. Those models can be useful. But what if we also became interested in the quality and range of a leader's perception?

Perhaps one of the questions we should be asking about high-potential leaders is simply:

How much can this person see?

Can they see themselves accurately enough to continue changing?

Can they revise their interpretation of another person when the evidence changes?

Can they make sense of competing truths without prematurely reducing them to a simple answer?

Can they see the system rather than only their place within it?

And perhaps most importantly, can their field of perception continue to expand as the scale and complexity of their leadership increases?

Executive selection changes

We tend to promote people because of what they have demonstrated.

That's understandable. Past performance is concrete. Perceptual capacity is harder to assess.

But the capabilities that made someone exceptional at one level can also narrow what they see at the next.

Experience is a lens - but it needs to be a telescope, rather than a microscope.

A leader's readiness for greater responsibility may therefore depend on more than what they know or what they've accomplished.

It may depend on their capacity to notice what they don't know, question what they think they know, and keep enlarging the field from which they make sense of the world. A sustained capacity for curiosity may be as important an indicator of readiness for greater responsibility as a track record of delivery.

And culture change changes

Organizations develop collective ways of seeing. Some information gets amplified; some gets dismissed or avoided. Certain questions can be asked; others can't. Some problems become urgent; others become normal. Over time, an organization develops an unspoken understanding of what matters, what gets rewarded, what is possible and what deserves attention.

Changing culture, then, isn't simply about asking people to behave differently. It also requires helping the organization see differently.

This started somewhere more personal

Perceptual LeadershipTM didn't begin as a theory I set out to develop. It emerged from me doing some digging into common threads and patterns in my work and what clients took away from our time together.

Again and again, some version of seeing showed up.

Seeing something they hadn't seen. Seeing a connection among things that had seemed unrelated. Seeing a person or situation differently. Sometimes, me seeing something in them before they could see it themselves.

I became curious about the pattern.

What was actually happening in those moments? Was "seeing" simply shorthand for experience or intuition? Or was there something more fundamental at work, something that could be understood, developed and deliberately practised?

That inquiry eventually became the idea I've been exploring through these essays.

After 30 years of coaching, during most of which I have stood firmly on the idea that “real” coaches don’t have content, I have reconsidered and reframed what I think I can contribute to the future of this work.

It isn't a particular coaching technique or a proprietary model. I don't particularly care whether thousands of people can recite four categories of perception.

I care whether more leaders learn to see what they couldn't see before.

To see themselves more accurately. To see other people with fewer assumptions. To see what is really happening around them. To see beyond the boundaries of what their organizations already know.

If some part of what I have learned to do over the past 30 years can be made more explicit, more teachable and more available to other leaders, that feels worth pursuing.

Which brings me to this question:

If perceptual capacity matters this much, how deliberately are we developing it?

What’s next?

For individual leaders, that inquiry can begin immediately with some self-reflection questions:

Where am I overly certain?Whose capabilities have I already decided?What information am I dismissing because it doesn't fit what I already believe?What has become so normal around here that I no longer see it?

But there is an equally important line of inquiry for CHROs, Chief Talent Officers and others responsible for developing senior leaders:

What would leadership development look like if expanding perception were one of its explicit aims?

What would we assess differently?What experiences would we create?What would we look for before moving someone into significantly greater scope?How would we know that a leader's capacity to see had actually expanded?

Not instead of building capability. Not instead of experience, feedback, coaching or thoughtful succession planning. But earlier in the process.

Where from here? My ask:

I don't yet have all the answers to those questions. That's partly the point.

An idea becomes much more refined - and therefore much more useful - when it encounters the complexity of actual organizations and actual leadership. So that's where I want to take this next.

I'm looking for two organizations interested in piloting Perceptual Leadership with a small group of senior or high-potential leaders.

Not as an off-the-shelf training program, but as an opportunity to work with these perceptual capacities, apply them to real leadership challenges, and learn what actually expands a leader's ability to see.

I will also consider launching a small cross-organization cohort for individual senior leaders who want to do this work alongside other experienced leaders if I get sufficient interest.

If either possibility interests you, I'd love to hear from you.

For decades, we've asked what great leaders do.

We've studied their habits, codified their competencies, assessed their behaviours and tried to teach other people to reproduce them.

Perhaps we've been starting one step too late.

Before a leader can choose differently, they have to see differently.

Before they can respond to what is changing, they have to notice it.

Before they can develop other people, they have to see those people beyond the stories they've already constructed about them.

Before they can change a system, they have to perceive the forces shaping it.

And before they can expand what is possible for an organization, they have to be able to see beyond what is already there.

Leadership begins with what you can see.

So after twelve essays about what leaders see, I'll leave you with one question.

What do I need to learn to see?