Episode 4B Leadership Development that works better than all that stuff we've been criticising.

The Nonsense Dialogues

In episode 4 part A we talked shite about leadership development practices and in this next episode, part 4B, we explore what we think effective leadership development programs should do to be actually effective in developing leadership for results.

To save space, here is a summary of the episode as a series of lists.

First list:

Leadership programs should:

• Be tailored to the organisation’s strategy and people.
• Focused on non trivial strategic changes that leads to a distinctive team identity and sustainable performance.
• Aimed at the group level rather than solely focused on individual leaders.
• Long term changes require long term interventions not just a single workshop or point of intervention.

Second List:

In our view the 5R leadership development program is, at present, the best evidence-based approach to helping people become better leaders. It is based on the decades of research into the social identity approach and developed by a team led by Prof Alex Haslam at University of Queensland.

The 5Rs are:

• Readying - Why do we matter? Raising awareness of the importance groups and social identity to leadership.
• Reflecting - Who are we? Understanding followers.
• Representing - What are we about and what do we want to be? Clarifying group aspirations and values.
• Realising - How do we become what we want to be? Implementing strategies to achieve group goals.
• Reporting - Are we becoming what we want to be? Monitoring progress to group goals.

For a more extensive presentation of the 5Rs and the whole area of social identity leadership we recommend you read Haslam, Reicher and Platow’s “The New Psychology of Leadership” Second Edition, 2020.

Third List:

And once again our 4Cs.

Leadership development programs need to be:

Consistent - the same leadership theory and practices throughout the organisation.

Coherent - development theories, practices, tools and assessments, etc

Credible - evidence based

Contemporary - not what you grandad learned.

So that’s the TLDL(listen) summary. If you want more details, you’ll have to listen to the podcast.

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others.
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.