Leadership Development: MHRM 6200

Video Transcript:

 

When it comes to talking about trends, we, like many people, immediately started thinking about technology. There are certainly tech trends that will influence the mediums in which leaders are developed, so we were not entirely wrong. Self-directed learning, gamification, and virtual training they’ll all greatly impact the way we evolve our future leaders (Hoffman & Vorhies, 2017). Open-systems learning will have an impact (Jesuthasan & Holmstrom, 2016) on the way that we consume knowledge. However, as trends go, this is low hanging fruit.

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So, for the purposes of this video, I’ll focus in on one trend that is particularly important, and that is the idea of Vertical development, vs Horizontal.

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To explain, horizontal development is linear, like adding more food to your bowl. Vertical, is getting a bigger bowl to fill. Horizontal would be adding new apps to your phone, vertical would be upgrading your processing system or RAM (Petrie, 2014).  It’s about developing the way you think, not about what you know. The difference is from a behavioral development, to one based on adult cognitive development (Reams, 2016).

This concept is increasingly important as it impacts how we structure leadership development. In the past, we would have been teaching our leaders academic concepts and helping them develop their skills. This is still an important part of what we need to teach, as we know anecdotally these skills are not inherent in every person. However, what this concept suggests is that we need to simultaneously teach them to increase their capacity or their ability to think, dissect, and act in complex situations.

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How to do this? Experts are saying that it revolves around “manufacturing experiences” (Petrie, 2014). The center for creative leadership talks about creating “heat” experiences, which mean first time, high visibility, results matter, experiences. A key component of this is being uncomfortable, which means leadership development involves risk taking, often involving the least qualified person to do the job (Petrie, 2014). There’s more to it than this of course, but that could be an entire project in and of itself.

 

So why is this approach going to be so vital? VUCA. VUCA is an acronym that represents the rapidly changing working environments, and the skills needed to adapt.  Its stands for: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (Sarkar, 2016).

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Petrie said it well in a White Paper for the Centre for Creative Leadership, when he said “Much of the stress I now see in leaders has less to do with workload and more to do with the strain of trying to make sense of an environment that has become too complex for their current stage of development.” Leaders of tomorrow have to think about problems differently.

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Gone are the days when subject matter expertise, and general skill development make the manager. Leaders of today need to be flexible, agile, are increasingly being asked to manage cross-functional workgroups, and borrow resources and expertise across complex and multilevel networks (Cullen-Lester, Maupin, & R., 2017). For leadership development practitioners, it will be more important than ever to ensure that they are educating leaders in more than just the leadership styles, for example, that has served us well in the past, but they need to develop capacities for things like network and systems management, tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to draw conclusions amid complexity.

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There is certainly more conversation to be had about this important concept but it is one trend we wanted to highlight today.