Are We Developing Our Leaders Like We Mean It?

This past week, I was catching up with friends, cousins, and professional colleagues after a long time. The topic of my involvement with The Rejuvi Venture, Inc. came up, of course 😊!

Immediately I was picking up some energy in these conversations around topics of development of leaders, performance management, how this is super important and how it is currently not where it needs to be. More importantly, however, there was an overwhelming opinion that whatever performance appraisal cycles they were involved in did not make sense to them and they never could tie these exercises to real development and growth in their careers. Frustratingly, they were expressing, how most of them, had no idea of what was being done with the data they were providing on behalf of others as well as data that was being collected on their behalf. There were strong sentiments expressed that the process felt more like a ‘check the box’ exercise at best and done primarily to meet procedural/audit requirements to receive and pay annual bonuses!

I wanted to dig deeper and here is what I am finding.

Gallup estimates that ~$2.5 to ~$35 million a year is expended by organizations of 10,000+ employees in lost FTE hours to participate in this annual dance. Further, Gallup also estimates that 14% of employees report ‘strongly agreeing’ that their performance reviews “inspire them to improve.”

Soak that in for a moment. What this really means is that 86%, i.e., ~9 out of every 10 don’t!

Frankly, this is not acceptable!

Leadership Development is not being taken seriously inside organizations. If it were, the reality above would not be true. If it were, we would not have a situation where 3 out of every 4 senior managers report that their Leadership Development programs were neither effective nor critical to their business outcomes. We need consistent and frequent feedback loops built into current ecosystems if we are serious about creating sustainable and significant performance shifts. This ‘feedback loop’ cannot be happening once a year and worse it should not be the equivalent of lip service.

We know that when leaders and their teams have more frequent and critical discussions about performance and development it drives higher levels of engagement and in turn higher levels of performance. Let us do away with annual performance reviews in their current state all together. Let us replace this with a far more frequent cadence to collect and analyze data to help our leaders build their capability and their capacity to grow their businesses.

How about this for modern leadership development?

Put in place an approach that collects leader capability and capacity data and analyzes it in literally minutes (clocking just under 10 minutes right now!) to activate a decisioning engine to deliver evidence based, prescriptive, leadership interventions that can be tied to driving top-line and bottom-line business metrics.

The more you leverage this kind of capability the less you will need an annual, feel good, ‘check the box’ exercise that 9 out of 10 associates don’t care about!

Reach out if you are serious about Leadership Development inside your organization. Let us do this as it can be done!