Have We Learned Anything About Leadership Development?

The Conference Board Review^® Article

Have We Learned Anything About Leadership Development?

Robert J. Kramer is a principal researcher at The Conference Board and author of the Board's Organizing for Global Competitiveness series of reports, which describe and analyze organization designs for corporate, business unit, regional, and country subsidiary operations. He also reports on global and Asian leadership development.

By all rights, we should have this down by now. A lingering leadership crisis continues to haunt the corporations of today and shows no sign of abating. Innumerable authorities have stepped in to offer solutions and counsel. From consultancies and B-schools has come an outpouring of literature on leadership and leadership development, taking different approaches to the problem of turning promising employees into executives capable of taking charge.

The thousands of books and articles are a strange mixture of alchemy, romantic idealism, and reason. We've seen formal studies of aspects of the subject, wisdom books by leading authorities, and musings by famous figures past and present who offer their views on what it all means. Business fables and parables present valuable life lessons in the duration of a single train ride; how-to manuals promise to reveal certain techniques guaranteed to turn virtually anyone into a leader.

After years of study and analysis devoted to the subject, fretful board members might expect to have reasonably accurate answers to key questions:

If developing leaders is so important, why are so few organizations good at it? And why are some industries — e.g., airlines — so notoriously bad at it?
After decades of corporate practice, why haven't we nailed down every important aspect of leadership development in terms of best practices?
Why do many companies dump resources into leadership programs rather than follow a natural-selection approach? Is it even possible for formal programs to teach or train people to be effective leaders?
Why does a disconnect persist between scholarship and corporate practitioners?
How does leader development differ from leadership development, and is the difference important?
Why do researchers and practitioners of leadership development ignore the impact of organization design as an important framework for the implementation of successful leadership development?

With so many questions that demand — and thus far lack — consistent and actionable answers, it is little wonder that some practical businesspeople are disposed to wash their hands of the whole subject, talent shortage or no talent shortage.

The study and practice of leadership and leadership development continues to be a work in progress, albeit one that shows frustratingly little progress. Leading authorities are finally coming to terms with our lack of fundamental knowledge about these closely related fields. "We believe that the leadership development field is today at a critical juncture," write Claremont McKenna's Jay Conger and Booz Allen Hamilton's Beth Benjamin. "We have learned a great deal . . . about designing more sophisticated interventions to educate our future leaders. Yet in other ways, we have simply progressed from the Bronze Age of leadership development to the Iron Age. We have advanced, but we have yet to truly enter the Information Age. Our designs and initiatives still have a long ways to go to reliably produce leaders who can cope with and, more importantly, shape the future."

Broad questions linger: Can leadership-development programs and processes truly forge a change whereby a talented businessperson becomes a great business leader? Can we discover, through a combination of evolving business practices and scientific research, the elixir we have long sought: the keys to developing effective leaders at all levels of our organizations?

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