Do you believe the following about developing leaders?
• Leadership can be learned, and continuously improved over time.
• People continually grow and develop, personally and professionally, over their lifetimes.
• There are times our intentions do not match our actions, and the only way we know about that gap is through regular feedback.
• The gap matters.
In multiple organizations, I’ve heard:
• “Nope, leaders are born, not made, and you either have it or you don’t.”
• “Yes, but I want to see what my return will be on any development investment I make.”
The ROI demand is completely fair. Corporate leadership learning must be linked to strategy, it must be relevant to running the business, and it has to affect either revenue or cost.
But what kind of “return” would convince you to construct a leadership development capability that includes the right mix of experience, coaching, and learning events with accountability built into the process?
A colleague told me today that he and his company were able to put a development process in place that increased internal promotions by 50%. That meant hiring significantly fewer leaders from the outside, which saved big recruiting expenses.
The intangible benefit is obvious to many – it also avoided the cost of failure among external leadership hires, and the cultural damage that can be done by a bad fit.
Proof: noun, 1. evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.
– Dictonary.com
If you believe at your core that leadership can be learned, that people are learning organisms, and that interacting with others is a valuable learning process, then you will believe an ROI presentation that forecasts impact. If you do not believe it, the evidence will never be sufficient to convince you.
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