McKinsey: Why Leadership Development Programs Fail
My colleagues and I have long called it “the dirty little secret of employee development”. According to the American Society for training and Development (ASTD), 80% of the money spent in employee development (of all kinds) is wasted. This is because little if any new participant behavior change occurs. And isn’t that why we invest in development to begin with?
According to their article (link above), McKinsey says $14B is spent annually in the US on leadership development. If so, then then applying ASTD’s finding means that more than $11B of that expenditure is wasted.
In their article, McKinsey offers four ways to make sure your leadership development efforts don’t fail. By way of preview (although I recommend you read the entire article), they are as follows:
- Overlooking context
- De-coupling reflection from real work
- Under-estimating mindsets
- Failing to measure
In my opinion, #4 should be #1. There’s an old adage that says, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. If you’re not measuring your leadership development, you should be. The article describes several good ways to do that, including one I almost always use: 360 or other assessment administered before and after development. This best-practice approach also makes it easy to calculate return-on-investment.
Whatever you do, don’t provide development with out measuring success, and simply hoping for the best result. Hope is not a strategy.