Been a victim of the great training robbery?

Harvard Professor Michael Beer and his colleagues used the 'great training robbery' phrase around five years ago. Despite huge amounts being spent on learning and development globally ($370bn in 2019 alone), they said companies

aren’t getting a good return on their investment. People soon revert to old ways of doing things, and company performance doesn’t improve.

Does this strike a chord?

The global HR thought leader Josh Bersin asked in 2019 why leadership development feels broken. According to him

the most effective companies now promote people into leadership before they’re ready, and then give them the tools and support to learn on the job, innovate with new ideas, and grow into their jobs.

What do tomorrow’s leaders need to be good at?

This week’s Economist has the answer, echoing what Accenture, Google, Cisco, IBM, McKinsey and many others have said:

The modern manager has to play the role of coach in charge of their team.

Effective leadership development

Learning from what works and what really doesn't, here are eight components that an effective coaching skills development programme should contain:

• Proper individual benchmarking at the outset to guide learning
• Real ‘rubber hits the road’ coaching practice, not role playing
• Coaching mentors who’ve walked in the shoes of successful leaders
• Peer-to-peer collaboration across sectors to cut out the groupthink
• Small-group live masterclasses because we’re programmed to learn socially
• Continuous learning through the year, not a crash course
• Inspiration from CEO role models and leadership experts
• Evaluation of impact from multiple sources including organisational network analysis

Knowledge itself is a part of it of course, but that's mostly free these days, isn't it?