Are leader development programs doing the right things?

For decades, leadership development has focused on what leaders do. In fact, in almost every conversation I’ve ever had about deploying executive coaching inside an organization, some or all of the following have been requested:

• Communication skills.
• Strategic thinking.
• Executive presence (please, just stop with this one).
• Decision-making.
• Influence.
• Emotional intelligence.

Development programs teach “competencies.” Assessments describe and evaluate behaviours. Companies deploy courses designed to “upskill” (again, please stop). The focus is entirely on capabilities. On “doing” - more, better, faster, and with less.

Yet organizations remain full of talented leaders who obsess about “tasks,” misread situations, misunderstand people, create unnecessary conflict, and make decisions that produce outcomes that either don’t achieve the right goals or don’t do it sustainably. Leaders remain so focused on “doing” that they forget - or never really learned - that their job is to build the “doing” (and thinking) capacity of others.

Perhaps leadership development has been trying to solve the wrong problem. Perhaps leadership development’s main focus should not be about improving behaviour.

After nearly thirty years of coaching senior leaders, I have come to believe that the quality of a leader's impact is limited by the quality of their perception.

Not their intentions, or intelligence, or experience. Their perception.

Humans do not respond to reality. They respond to their perception of reality. And perception is far less objective than most of us would like to believe.

I’ve witnessed two people sit in the same meeting and leave with entirely different interpretations of what happened. I’ve known leaders who pride themselves on their candour but whose team experiences them as political. I’ve seen leaders who think they are empowering others but who are really just creating confusion.

And then there are the leaders who believe they are showing confidence while others see arrogance.

One of my favourite distinctions to offer a client struggling with not getting the outcomes they hope for is the “intent versus impact” distinction. The gap between intent and impact is often a perception gap.

Everyone sees the world through filters - past experiences, assumptions and biases, previous successes and failures, values, goals. Our filters serve us - they are how we make sense of what we experience. And those same filters distort our view and shape our intentions.

Most leaders are unaware of how profoundly their filters - their perspectives - shape their understanding of people and situations.

If you filter for safety, new ideas seem risky. If you filter for approval you won’t hear different opinions. If you filter for peacefulness you’ll favour consensus versus alignment. If you filter for certainty, ambiguity feels threatening. If you filter for speed, reflection feels inefficient. And, perhaps worst of all, If you filter for achievement, relationships become secondary.

Blind spots become sources of risk - both personal and business.

The leaders who create the greatest impact are rarely the ones with the strongest opinions. They are the ones with the greatest capacity to see. But don't see more because they're smarter. They see more because they've learned to question what they think they already know.

They are curious, they invite diverse input, they investigate their own assumptions and they consider multiple perspectives.

This is why I have come to believe that leadership is fundamentally a perceptual discipline.

I've long said that every leader eventually reaches a Grand Canyon moment. A point where everything that made them successful is no longer enough and they are confronted by the need to make an enormous leap. But the leap isn't from one job to another. It's from knowing to seeing. From doing to building capacity. From having answers to asking better questions.

The future of leadership development may not be in teaching leaders to do more. It may be in helping them see more. Themselves, others, systems, possibilities.

Every breakthrough I've witnessed in a leader's effectiveness began with a shift in what they could see. Because when perception expands, leadership changes.

And when leadership changes, everything else follows.

What if your greatest leadership limitation is not something you don't know, but something you cannot yet see?

For a great read on our collective "doing" problem, check out Liane Davey's new book,"Thoughtload."