16 minute read
REMOTE LEADERSHIP
According to Forbes in 2019, leadership development funding is estimated at $166 billion annually in the U.S., but does it produce results? Typically, no. Now, let’s also assume leadership development must be performed remotely. Sounds difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. Here is a formula for in-person and remote leadership training that works.
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An effective development program goes beyond creating engaged, motivated and competent employees. When executed correctly, the program produces maximum workplace performance and organizational results.
Whether you are a training professional tasked with designing a remote leadership development program, an executive looking for an effective solution or a vendor hoping to provide training, the Kirkpatrick Model provides a framework for programs that measurably increase performance and produce business results.
DOCUMENT
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
For any training request, start by asking what Level 4 results the program will support. What high-level organizational outcomes will the training positively influence? For example, will better remote leadership reduce employee turnover, increase productivity and customer satisfaction, or reduce waste?
Get clear on the high-level outcomes the training should deliver to be considered a success. Ideally, these outcomes are discussed and defined in a two-way conversation between the training provider and the stakeholders.
INVEST IN A
COMPREHENSIVE IMPLEMENTATION PLAN
Organizations are usually clear on the outcomes that are most important to them, but less clear on how to achieve them. They expect training magic: Send your people to a one-day program, and achieve the desired results. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. And simply converting in-person training to virtual training is not the answer either.
The most critical part of any training program, remote leadership development included, is a well-defined Level 3 implementation plan. There is strong agreement that formal training on its own yields only a fraction of desired outcomes. On-the-job experiences are the biggest source of learning for employees. Therefore, on-the-job environment and organizational culture significantly impact how employees perform, regardless of their knowledge. Decentralized teams and remote leadership add an additional layer of importance to the Level 3 plan.
Training and the business should work together to define what needs to change or occur reliably in the on-the-job environment and employee performance to yield desired results. Then, they should create a support and accountability package to help employees and their managers succeed.
Training budgets are often cut, because data connecting learning to organizational outcomes is missing, due to lacking a Level 3 implementation plan. Therefore, creating a plan and defining roles and responsibilities early in the planning phase is critical not only for the success of a remote leadership program but for the continued existence of the training function as we know it today.
DEFINE
CRITICAL BEHAVIORS
The first step in creating a Level 3 plan is to define the critical behaviors that future remote leaders need to develop and exhibit in observable, measurable terms. For example, critical behaviors for remote leaders could be: [ Publish organizational, departmental and personal goals to all direct reports.
[ Conduct daily team meetings and weekly employee touch-bases via video conference.
[ Review weekly status reports and provide feedback for each direct report.
Critical behaviors often influence organizational processes and systems due to underpinned assumptions. In this case, the organization has a goal-setting process and a culture that employees must complete and submit weekly status reports. The more structure and accountability that exists organizationally, the easier it is to build a Level 3 plan.
CREATE A SUPPORT AND
ACCOUNTABILITY PACKAGE
Human nature dictates that, even when people know what they are supposed to do, many factors influence their behavior. For example, leaders know that spending time with their direct reports is important, but sometimes deadlines and workload influence them to delay or cancel oneon-one time with their team members. In remote working situations, there could be environmental influences such as children and pets that make video calls inconvenient.
Effective remote leadership requires a Level 3 plan, including a variety of methods and tools to support leaders in performing their critical behaviors and hold them accountable. Providing support is usually enjoyable. Look for ways to help your busy remote leaders do the right thing – such as providing templates, checklists, small rewards and reminders. If resources are available for formal coaching and mentoring, these can be very effective tools.
Holding remote leaders accountable is less enjoyable, but it is necessary for remote leadership to produce expected results. Begin with existing accountability tools and techniques, and see if there are gaps that should be filled. Possible examples include:
[ Time tracking software.
[ Weekly reports.
[ Dashboards.
[ Performance tracking systems.
The key is to ensure that you track not only the results but the steady performance and adoption of critical behaviors by managers.
Monitoring performance takes time and resources. During remote leadership program development, discuss posttraining roles and responsibilities and obtain buy-in for a plan. If resources are tight, look at methods of self-monitoring, reporting and peer mentoring as viable alternatives. Remote leaders can also have regularly scheduled meetings to discuss their successes and challenges in adopting critical behaviors and support each other.
The Level 3 plan is the most important part of your remote leadership program. The quality and execution of your plan are the biggest contributors to the success of your remote leaders. Define post-training support and accountability as part of the training package, and build it at the same time as formal training materials. Broadening your definition of training better positions your program for success.
DEFINE
SPECIFIC METRICS
Training is often evaluated cumulatively when the program is complete. Refocus most of your analysis on formative evaluation – data collected during training
and implementation – so you can correct issues and maximize performance and results along the way.
Before training, find out what metrics are important to the stakeholders, the managers of learners, the learners themselves and the leadership development cohort. Make sure you have metrics for both performance and outcomes. Determine who will gather and report the data and in what format. Decide which data will be reported throughout the initiative to track progress and identify areas for improvement.
CONNECT
THE DOTS
Prior to and during training, let learners know what they are expected to do after training, what support is available to them, how their performance outcomes will be tracked and how they contribute to organizational success. Making the connection between training, performance and high-level outcomes has many benefits. Participants come to training with a higher level of interest and are more engaged. Therefore, they learn more, and – when applying their new learnings on the job is difficult – support is available to them. Perhaps the most critical time for creating training success is when training graduates return to the job. Ensure there are regular checkpoints to verify that support and accountability actions occur. Use technology to set automated reminders for yourself, supervisors, stakeholders and the training graduates.
Most programs are not instantly successful. Expect to have setbacks, and be prepared with a remediation plan. This is the reason that continual monitoring and reinforcement is required for success in most programs. Program plan changes are to be expected; they are not signs of failure.
REPORT
MEANINGFUL DATA
Powerful program data are a combination of numbers and supporting metrics on performance and results. Connect learning, performance and results to tell your success story. If you attempt to report program results with no on-the-job performance data, expect objection that some other factor created or influenced the outcomes. If you provide numeric data and no supporting stories or evidence, it is also difficult to make the connection. There are always multiple factors that influence results. A simple way to collect this data is to survey the remote leaders and their supervisors on what factors contributed to their success. Ensure respondents can provide openended responses, so you capture their stories. Remote leaders would likely say their success is due to a combination of things, such as training, technology tools, support from their peers, supervisory guidance, personal initiative and regular progress checkpoints. With a reasonable investment of resources, you can show the relative contribution of these factors at Kirkpatrick Levels 2, 3 and 4. The blended data shows the value that training brings to the company and highlights other important factors in company success, giving credit where credit is due and contributing to a teambased approach to success.
Level 1:
Reaction
The kirkpatrick model
Level 4:
results
Level 3:
behavior
Level 2:
learning
The degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training and support and accountability package.
The degree to which participants apply what they learned during training when they are back on the job.
The degree to which participants acquire the intended knowledge, skills, attitude, confidence and commitment based on their participation in the training.
The degree to which participants find the training favorable, engaging and relevant to their jobs.Level 1:
Reaction
GET
STARTED
Do not be intimidated if you have never created a training plan including performance support and accountability. Select one important initiative with executive sponsorship and support to use as a pilot. Create a committee to work with you. Focus more resources on the post-training plan than on the training itself. The time you dedicate to the pilot is an investment that will make subsequent programs faster and easier.
Before you know it, you will be building and implementing Level 3 plans for all important company initiatives and successfully connecting training, performance and results. More importantly, you will be maximizing program outcomes and minimizing resources invested. And, that’s a blueprint for training that works.
Jim and Wendy Kirkpatrick are coauthors of “Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation.” Learn more at kirkpatrickpartners.com. Email Jim and Wendy.
We are bringing light to a distinction between leadership competencies and leadership capacity that is absolutely critical in the leadership development field, because not understanding this distinction severely limits equipping leaders to handle today’s challenges.
Training and development professionals are often tasked with making lists of leadership competencies, which are generally presented as leadership behaviors and skills that, when developed, can contribute to superior performance. We can use the example of “collaboration.” Collaborative leaders clearly drive higher engagement and generate better and more sustainable results.
Leadership capacity is the ability to think and then act in ways that are more effective during times of increasing VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) and rapid change. Increasing leadership capacity (rather than just teaching competencies) is known as vertical development.
In our work, we use a map of adult development applied to leadership, Levels of Development-in-Action (see Figure 1). Just as children keep changing “operating systems” throughout their young lives, as adults we keep developing at later-stage “operating systems.”
Think of competencies as software on a computer, which become increasingly more effective using more advanced operating systems. Leadership capacity is about the structure of our thinking – not what we think about but rather how we think about it.
What is different for leaders at later stages of adult development?
⊲ Leaders are more reflective. They think more about what they are doing and how to do it better.
⊲ They are better able to take perspectives (putting themselves in others’ shoes) and to seek perspectives (asking questions to understand how others see things).
⊲ They are better able to integrate multiple factors, and thus make decisions that incorporate the perspectives of different
stakeholders (employees, customers, etc.), multiple timelines (short-term, long-term), and more.
⊲ They are likely to have greater selfawareness, and allow themselves to be more vulnerable, acknowledging that they do not have all the answers and need the perspectives of others to optimize results. This allows them to be better at developing others and creating contexts imbued with safety and trust that then generate better solutions to complex problems.
Leaders who think at earlier stages of development will over-simplify complex problems. They will look for “one right answer” or “who is to blame.” Their approaches to these complex problems are inherently limited and likely will not know it.
For example, imagine a group of leaders attend a workshop about collaboration. One leader tends to see things only in terms of his own perspective. He assumes he knows the “right” way to do things, believes there is “one right answer,” has low self-awareness, and has difficulty admitting when he is not sure of something. Imagine how limited his collaboration will be. He may ask others superficial questions, mostly to get their buy-in to what he has already decided, but others know better than to question him.
Another leader knows that complex situations require the integration of multiple perspectives, has no problem exhibiting vulnerability by saying and believing they don’t know all the answers, and provides a context that makes it clear that all perspectives are valued and welcomed. There is no fear that ideas will be dismissed or discounted or ridiculed. Imagine how rich the collaboration will be and how much more effective in driving sustainable organizational results.
The Basic Problem in the Field of Leadership Development
More than half of all leaders think like the first leader we described above, and those leaders have little choice to think at a more advanced level in the moment. Only about 10 percent think like the second leader.
Can you understand the problem? Having talent development professionals create a list of competencies does not mean that most leaders have the capacity to “run” those competencies using a sufficiently advanced “operating system” to actually embody them.
And most training and development professionals do not know how to assist leaders in upgrading their overall operations systems or capacity. They can present trainings on their lists of competencies but much of that energy is wasted. Leaders, no matter how wellintentioned, cannot “will” themselves to a later-stage level of development.
The other problem with lists of competencies is that all leaders already have a day job and have very little bandwidth for integrating new ideas. As we wrote in a previous article for Training Industry, Awareness ≠ Change. Change is hard and takes repeated cycles of action and reflection throughout the day. Even with the most sophisticated approaches we know, integrating advanced in neuroscience, one or two areas of change are all we can handle.
Levels of Development
PreConventional Conventional Post-Conventional
Opportunist
Own needs Conformer
Fitting in Expert
Standing out
45%
2% 8%
Win/Lose
Achiever
Results
35%
Catalyst
New perspectives Co-Creator
Systems and principles Alchemist
Flow
5% 4%
1%
Increase in: Awareness and Reflection System/Context Both/And Perspective Taking Perspective Seeking Complexity and Integration Multiple Factors Stakeholders Higher Principles Healthy Ownership Agility/Versatility
Win/Win Transformative Dialogue
© 2017 Clear Impact Consulting Group
Capability is Also Important
It is important to note that the ability for a leader to actually do something depends on more than their internal competency and capacity. There is also capability. For example, it also depends on the context in which that leader is leading: What resources are available? What behaviors are allowed and/or rewarded in that organization? What are the competencies and capacities of his or her team?
Imagine two leaders identical in their competencies and capacity. One is in a situation with very limited resources,
a hiring and spending freeze, and has legacy employees who were promoted for tenure rather than ability. The other has a large budget and the ability to have the right people in the right roles. Their current capability to take effective action will be different.
Increasing Vertical Development
It is very important to understand that the level at which a leader functions is not “fixed.” Leaders can and do make leaps in their overall capacity. What does that take? It helps when they have leaders around them who function at a laterstage level, when they see limitations or gaps in their own leadership thinking and action, and when they are motivated to stretch themselves and grow. But even with all these factors, they also need to be provided the right opportunity, exposure to capacity-building curriculum, and a learning context that is based on an understanding of Levels of Developmentin-Action, where they are presented tools and models that “stretch their brains.”
Our brains change slowly over time with regular ongoing cycles of action and reflection. They do not change through attending a single workshop, no matter how well the material is presented. Willing participants need to be coupled with skilled trainers who function at a later-stage level and understand how to build capacity (rather than just teach competencies). And then they need to be given the time and support to grow, where they can be provided a safe environment to try new ways of thinking and acting.
If training and development professionals do not function at a sufficiently laterstage level of development, they will be unable to assist leaders in increasing capacity. This is one problem with many train-the-trainer approaches. Unfortunately, in our experience, the field of training and development is largely unaware of levels of development and does not know how to promote actual capacity building.
Unless you have specifically been introduced to levels of adult development, these models will be new to you. If you try to map them onto other ideas or models, you will lose the point. This is not about IQ. Two people with the same IQ can function at very different Levels of Development-in-Action, and therefore, capacity. This also has nothing to do with personality models, styles of leadership, experience, age-related maturity, or one’s management level. It has a lot to do with what learning approaches and environments someone has been exposed to, and their motivation coupled with having the right opportunities.
In order to assist leaders in moving to later-stage levels of development, whether we’re in the role of leader, consultant, trainer, coach, human resources, talent management or human capital professionals, we have to first be functioning at later-stage levels of development than those leaders.
If you are drawn to what we have shared, then please take the time to understand the difference between competencies and capacity to build your own capacity so you can assist others to do the same.
We hope this article has stimulated some new thinking, and that we have made a compelling case for why it is imperative to consciously craft opportunities and contexts that support vertical development in order for our leaders to deal more effectively with complex problems.
Dr. Joel M. Rothaizer, MCC, and Dr. Sandra L. Hill are organizational effectiveness consultants, executive coaches and leadership development specialists at Clear Impact Consulting Group. Email the authors.
Takeaways
⊲ Leadership competencies are leadership behaviors and skills.
⊲ Leaders function at different levels of development, and all competencies are understood and expressed more effectively at later-stage levels.
⊲ Vertical development focuses on increasing the capacity to use any competencies more effectively, and thus the capacity to lead more effectively during times of increasing VUCA and rapid change.
⊲ Some competencies, like coaching and collaboration, are not viable until a leader reaches a certain stage of development.
⊲ Depending on how a competency is defined, there may be a “capacity gap” for a particular leader to be able to embody that competency at a minimally effective level, no matter how much they are rewarded, encouraged, punished externally, or motivated internally.
⊲ Whatever the competency, it will always be expressed more effectively by leaders thinking at a later-stage capacity level.
⊲ Focusing solely on leadership competencies is inherently limited. It is like adding new software programs without upgrading the overall operating system.
