The Nonsense Dialogues

In this episode we take a look at the effectiveness of leadership development programs and question if they are truly worth the time and money organisations spend on them. 

David reviews his possibly wasted career in leadership development and defends against Randal’s accusations that the dominant individualistic approach emphasising self reflection and self actualisation, is just indulging the narcissism of our clients and has no evidence to support its efficacy. David presents a somewhat defensive argument that there actually is evidence in the literature that approaches focused on competencies and behaviours, such as transformational leadership, do seem to make a positive impact. 

Randal presents the argument that leadership development may be effective but “it depends”.  Sounding like every psychologist and consultant ever.   Context, group attributes and tailoring our interventions to these variables are presented as the way forward. 

In Part B we will follow through on these arguments with our own ideas of what is required for effective leadership development rather than the same old rubbish that everyone else has been doing. 

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others. 
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit. 

In which we explore the very lucrative business of Leadership Development. We initially look to distinguish leader development from leadership development but soon wander through a series of increasingly discursive topics including: 

• diversity of identity and skills, do these help or hinder?, 
• the commercial imperative vs evidence based practice in leadership development, 
• how a lack of a clear definition of leadership leads to mixed methodologies for leadership development that lack focus and thus impact, 
• with organisations being complex systems beyond the ken of our simple primate brains, we thus use simple interventions that we can only hope will have the desired impact of better leadership, 
• role of social engineering and elitism in leadership development, 
• Randal says the best way to learn to become a leader is to become a good follower first and this is how naturalistic leader development used to happen,
• one study showed that team members prefer to follow  team members who are good  followers but the current leaders prefer as future leaders who distinguish themselves by taking charge and setting agendas for others. 
• why don't organisations follow the literature on experiential learning, facing challenges and 702010? Randal and David disagree that these approaches are valid,
• but do agree that this is part of the much larger question of organisational change which should be covered later as this episode is already too long. 

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others. 
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit. 

In this episode ask whether our current crop leaders are hopeless? Lots of talking in circles as usual but surprisingly, we end with a quite decent (in our humble opinion) definition of leadership.

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others. 
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit. 

Our first published podcast, where we sabotage our careers by pointing out how CEO pay may be making it harder for them to lead. 
We also debate leadership,  individualism vs collectivism, rats and lawyers, Plato's anti democratic beliefs, and a brief mention of Hitler (but I think we got away with it). 

Being good evidence based practitioners, we are seeking feedback from our audience on our podcasts. So please tell us all the things we are doing well as well as pandering to your innate drive to criticise the work of others. 
We may listen and adjust or we may just continue to be ourselves and do things our own way, dammit.