When an organisation brings us in to develop its leaders, it usually arrives with a shopping list.
Confidence. Presence. Impact. A compelling story. The ability to stand in front of three hundred people without visibly sweating. Whatever the current leadership team thinks great leadership looks like, they would like more of it, please, in everyone else.
And it’s true, an organisation should have a clear idea of what good leadership looks like. The trouble is that list is often a description of the people who wrote it.
A few months ago I was working with a team when one of them asked if we could spend some time on his promotion interview. He’d gone for the role once already and not got it. The feedback was oddly precise: he’d made a brilliant case for why his part of the business needed more senior leadership, and no case at all for why that leader should be him. He’d argued for the role, but he’d forgotten to argue for himself.
His values were collaboration, communication and connection, and giving his team the space to actually do the work. He’s calm, factual and softly spoken. He doesn’t wave his hands about. He doesn’t recount a near-miss deal like it’s the last ten minutes of Ocean’s Eleven. The panel wanted dynamic, driven, charismatic, ambitious. He was ambitious. He just didn’t sound the way they expected ambition to sound.
He got the promotion second time round. I’d love to tell you that’s the happy ending, and thatmy coaching can get you promoted too if that’s what you want, but I’m not sure it’s that simple. The people judging him in the new role are the same people who wanted him to show up exactly as they do, so there’s a real chance that however great a job he does, he’ll still be ignored. Because he’s not a carbon copy of the original leadership.
The loop nobody spots
In Pattern Power terms, this is a classic Inertia Loop.
The trigger is a problem in the business. The leadership team looks around for someone who can fix it and finds no one.
The reaction is panic. They need someone who can fix the problem but they’re scared and in a hurry, so they default to what they know and look for somebody who just like them.
The impact is that the same kind of person gets promoted again and again. Leadership starts to look one-dimensional, and, even worse, the original problem never gets solved.
And it repeats. Year after year of the same problem reappearing and everyone wondering why it never gets solved.
This is the awkward bit of running a leadership development company - sometimes you have to tell your client that what they want, isn’t what they need. We’ll happily come and teach your middle managers how to show up with presence but if you want to see a seismic change in your business, you’re better off asking us to have some honest conversations with your leadership team. Working out the patterns they’re stuck in and how to get out of them, will do more for your business than helping your middle managers become carbon copies of the people above them.
So, for anyone thinking of hiring Lea_p for leadership development, it might be worth asking a harder question in the boardroom first: who have we overlooked, and why have we been blind to them?
If you really want to know, maybe ask the person sitting quietly in your next meeting - they’ve known the answer for months, you just haven’t made space to hear them.
Harriet x
