The Future of Leadership Development

The need for leadership development has never been more urgent. Companies of all sorts realize that to survive in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment, they need different leadership skills and organizational capabilities from those that helped them succeed in the past at all levels of the firm. But the leadership development industry is in a state of upheaval. The number of players offering courses to impart the hard and soft skills required of corporate managers has expanded well beyond the traditional business schools, corporate universities, and dedicated consultancies. And yet organizations that spend billions of dollars annually to train current and future executives are growing frustrated with the results. There are three main reasons for the disjointed state of leadership development. The first is a gap in motivations. In executive development, the “customer” is not the “client.” The organization pays for the individual to enhance his or her skills—and résumé—and thereby benefit from participating. The second is the gap between the skills that executive development programs build and the skills that organizations require—particularly the interpersonal skills essential to thriving in today’s flat, networked, increasingly collaborative organizations. The third reason is the skills transfer gap. Simply put, most executives do not seem to take what they learn in the classroom and apply it to their jobs. For organizations to develop essential leadership and managerial talent, they will need to bridge these three gaps. The good news is that the growing assortment of online courses, social and interactive platforms, and learning tools from both traditional institutions and upstarts—which we call the personal learning cloud (PLC)—offers a solution. Organizations can select components from the PLC and tailor them to the needs and behaviors of individuals and teams. The PLC is flexible and immediately accessible, and it enables employees to pick up skills in the context in which they must be used. In effect, it’s a 21st-century form of on-the-job learning.