The Hard Work of Reconciling Rhetoric with Reality in Leadership Development

Eric Harper, Ed.D., is adjunct faculty at the University of Texas at Dallas and head of talent and learning for a privately held company in the apparel industry.

We often prefer to live in a dream world, inhabited by superheroes and monsters that get their just deserts.As insightfully pointed out by Stanford scholar, Jeffrey Pfeffer, a huge chasm often exists between rhetoric and reality in leadership development practices. This became especially apparent when we were recently talking about a manager frustrated by his inability to reach the next level. Rightfully frustrated, this manager had worked diligently to steep himself in his company’s leadership development programs. He had also worked tirelessly to apply the content, work with mentors, apply 360 feedback, and successfully deliver his annual objectives. Further frustrating for us all, we were unable to sufficiently identify and articulate what was holding him back. We could not pinpoint anything specific, nor actionable, that would be helpful. Ultimately, we were forced to acknowledge what so many leadership practitioners seldom confront: the espoused leadership development programming of his company was really a romanticized lore that do not reflect the actual mechanics of how successful leaders operated there. This rampant disconnection not only compromises the usefulness leadership development, but it derails capable individuals who trust the lore at their own professional peril. Further, it provides evidence that oftentimes leadership development professionals are living in their own fantasy land. 

Here is why it happens:

1. We find it much more enlivening and interesting to envision what we aspire to.  Aspirations give us energy and power and help us to avoid the mundane. A manager we coached was always enthusiastic every time we met with him.  However, each time we met with him his aspirations had shifted and he seemed to thrive on the energy he gained from each new aspiration, but he was unable to accomplish any of them. 

2. We are experts at building a positive profile, brand and memory. This has important mental health benefits as it wards off discouragement and depression.  The downside, however, is that we often enter a new project or work with dramatically unrealistic goals, things that fuel our imagination, but cannot be realized.  We are not downplaying the importance of imagination and the way it fosters creativity, rather we are suggesting it needs to be tempered with what can be accomplished otherwise it all becomes a pipe dream.Too often leadership development professionals and programs encourage people to think innovatively, to be creative, all the while emphasizing inspiration without helping leaders to understand the work involved. 

3. We rarely admit to ourselves or others the times we deviate from our values, tell small lies, and choose the expedient course rather than the ethical and honorable one. We want to believe that we always do the right thing when we know that we have not always done so.  The worst part is that we lie or pretend to ourselves that we do not engage in these practices.   

Here is what we can do about it…

• Help the managers and leaders we are working with cultivate their observational and reflection skills. Encourage these managers to think like anthropologists and less like trial attorneys by helping them engage in a spirit of inquiry about themselves and those they interact with. If they do this the disparities between rhetoric and reality will become apparent. They will start to see when they are playing a game and when they are grounded in the reality of the situation.

• Use after-action-reviews to look at the good and bad elements of a decision, situation, or project. Facilitate these reviews through discussions between all stakeholders. This type of rigor will help avoid the bifurcation of what countless movies, TV shows, and superheroes tell us that we are either holy or evil. This approach helps to build honesty in our self-evaluations and assessments. 

• Stop being tempted to believe the titles and advice of thousands of books on leadership and millions of articles; that the promised land can be achieved by following ten principles just discovered by the author along with finding oil in his backyard. Developing your leadership capabilities is hard work and it needs to be tempered with your own honest self-reflection about what succeeds in the organization you are a part of.  Don’t fall for the hype, listen to the leaders in your organization who do not confuse the rhetoric with the reality.    

Breaking rejection news to internal candidates passed over for promotions has to be up there on the conversations-that-suck rating scale. This can be further painful when the candidate has voraciously taken, and applied the rhetoric of leadership development that is divorced from reality.