Dave Ulrich

Dave Ulrich

Leadership Sustainability: Develop seven integrated disciplines
Most good leaders try to become better. Thousands of leaders: attend leadership training; receive performance reviews; get individual development plans; receive coaching with ideas on how to change their behavior and deliver better results; and complete a 360-degree feedback process with data on how they are seen by others. At the end, most leaders resolve to use their new insights and be more effective. Unfortunately, few implement these good intentions. Leaders do not always finish what they start. At the end of every improvement effort, participants need the discipline to do what they desire and to turn their aspirations into actions. Our purpose is to help leaders sustain the changes that they know they should make—that is, to support leadership sustainability

Most of us who are interested in developing leadership have been here. We have taught a leadership development course with the latest principles of effective leadership; we have coached an aspiring leader about how to interpret and use 360 feedback; or we have reviewed an organization’s leadership development plans with the board or executive committee. Implicit in these and similar conversations and forums are the noble desires that principles become practices, that data turns into action, and that plans become realities.

To learn more about how to develop leadership sustainability in your organization, click on the document below.

Leadership is a topic where the volume of writing does not match the value. Much is written and many of the same ideas are repeated. In the last decade, we have addressed the issue of how leaders have impact by contributing to this huge volume of work with four books and many articles. In this article, we review this work and synthesize how we believe we’ve contributed a unique perspective around four ideas.

Leadership: Developing individual leaders matters and building leadership capability matters even more. In this two-day “think tank” we will respond to three questions that will improve each participant’s ability to build stronger leaders and better leadership capability: 1. Why does leadership matter? We will discuss our latest round of studies about how investors consider quality of leadership as a factor in investment choices. We have completed a survey of several hundred investors and have led focus groups all over the world with different kinds of investors. We will ask participants to understand their company from an investor perspective and to build a strong case for investment for their company. 2. What is good leadership? We will review RBL’s six steps for building a leadership brand and then show the differences between how the top companies compare to everyone else in each step. We will use regional and global examples of top companies (based on the 2011 Top Companies for Leaders study conducted in partnership with RBL, Aon Hewitt, and Fortune.) 3. How do leaders ensure sustainability? Leaders are able to make things stick when they follow seven proven principles - simplicity, timeliness, accountability, resources, tracking, meliorate, and emotion. We will review ideas from our to be published book on leadership sustainability. The purpose of this workshop is to generate new and fresh ideas for these leadership concepts. As faculty we will both present our latest thinking and facilitate discussion among participants.

We believe it is time to bring together decades of theorizing about leadership: we need to simplify and synthesize rather than generate more complexity and confusion. Faced with the incredible volume of information about leadership, we turned to recognized experts in the field who had already spent years sifting through evidence and developing their own theories. Synthesizing the data, the interviews, and our own research and experiences, a framework emerged that we simply call the Leadership Code.