Epic Think Tank

Leadership and e-learning

• What works in leadership development - and what doesn't?

It has long been acknowledged that developing leadership capabilities is for the individual concerned an issue of personal growth. Successful programmes often contain strong elements of self-reflection, and of learning to understand realities different from one's own. Effective leadership programmes take people out of their 'comfort zones' and expose them to other worlds.

The 'outward bound centre model' was touched on in this regard; a much-derided but firmly entrenched part of the training landscape.

Clearly the business of developing leadership within organisations demands a different approach from more basic types of training. We are not aiming merely to pass on a body of memorisable fact here, or to instruct in routinised processes such as entering records in a database.

With the previous discussion in mind, the task in hand can be tentatively defined as developing a clarity of problem solving, but also instilling a mindset which goes looking for new problems to solve. Foresight is a key element of strategic leadership. Effective leaders have the capacity to construct an understanding of their environment and make sense of periods of ambiguity and uncertainty.

A strong emphasis falls on the experiential element of training. In a context where there are no right answers, and no such thing as an authoritative text, the balance of instruction versus the chance to try out lessons learned in a realistic (or even real) situation shifts decisively in favour of the latter. In fact, one thing that almost all the participants seemed to agree on was that a leadership programme with absolutely no experiential component is doomed to fail.

Leadership training in the Army provided an instructive example. Not least because:

• The military regards leadership as a 'core competence'
  
• Training in general is, to put it in marketing parlance, a 'key differentiator' for HM forces - 'Britain has the best-trained soldiers in the world' is a popular cliché

So what is distinctive, from the point of view of our discussion, about the way the Army develops leaders?

1. There is a tendency to focus on developing those who show innate leadership qualities.
   
   

2. The commitment to those learners is long term: periods of instruction are interspersed with years in which they are returned to fields of operation to 'make a few mistakes'.
   
   

3. It is expected that in such a model, with its strong emphasis on experimental learning, mistakes will occur.

Two rather tough questions arise from applying this example to leadership training in the wider context.

In the first place, if we focus on the 5% who show innate leadership abilities at an early stage, are we failing the 95% who don't? This is particularly relevant since the current perception of leadership as a development issue is that it has as much relevance for, say, a team leader in a call centre as it does for the chief executive of a large corporate.

Secondly, how likely is it that leaders will emerge in a risk-averse, process-focused culture? This is perhaps a particular issue in the public sector, where there is a danger that 'you end up managing leadership out'.

At this point the debate risks widening to a discussion of larger issues outside the scope of the symposium - however a clear indication seemed to be emerging of the shape an effective leadership programme might need to take.

Participants need to be enabled in solving problems in an experiential context where the results of the decisions they make can be directly experienced as sets of new decisions to address. This is necessarily going to involve making mistakes. Mistakes can be costly in an organisational context, which gives rise to a paradox: the more real an environment that can be provided for this 'practical work' on leadership, the more valuable the learning experience - but also the more costly the mistakes!

Technology has part of the answer here. High end simulations already provide a means of training on equipment such as helicopters and battleships while limiting the risk to life and precious resources. Scenario-based simulations can also be used to model real time decision-making - picking up some of the experiential slack. But that's not the whole story. Treating leadership development as a long term project, with periodic interventions interspersing with operational episodes, also helps limit the risk of this very necessary mistake-making. The cost of mistakes at strategic level can be cataclysmic, as we frequently see in the headlines. Better to make one's mistakes on the nursery slopes of lower management levels - at any early stage of one's career - than in the high mountains.

The implications are clear:

1. Since learning to lead will always involve 'making a few mistakes', putative leaders need a realistic yet relatively safe environment in which to make these early stage errors.
   
   

2. A commitment to leadership development has to start lower and earlier within the organisation than might presently be contemplated - and has to be prepared to think long term.

…So how can technology help with this process?

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Background
Part 1 Leaders vs. Managers
Part 3 Putting the 'e' in Leadership
Afterword