by Lester Coupland

Leadership Development and the ROI RItual

According to HBR (1) every year global organisations invest more than $60 billion in leadership development programs.

Sponsors of such programs normally go through the ritual of questioning the ROI and probably have to be content with an answer that secures the internal resources even if the answer is less than convincing.

Here at LSC in our own leadership development work with clients, we have found two approaches which help in this quest to evaluate impact.

The first approach is to focus more on leadership acts rather than on behaviors. When repeated, the acts become activities and, over time, the latter can become practices and eventually embedded cultural norms.

Naturally the behaviors are important, but they are the skillful enablers of the acts rather than an end in themselves.

These are our suggested definitions for the AAPC Framework:

1. ACT
A deed, something done with an end in mind (e.g. get a leader to facilitate a team meeting about the strategy to surface how team members view it).

2. ACTIVITY
An act done on a regular basis (e.g. having coffee together as a team twice a week where people can talk informally about their interpretation of the strategy).

3. PRACTICE
An activity that starts to become an accepted part of how we do the work and we all buy into (e.g. we rotate the preparation of the agenda and chairing of our team meetings and support and challenge each other on how we are implementing the strategy).

4. CULTURAL NORM
A practice that is now embedded as the way we do things, i.e. our culture (e.g. we all talk about the strategy day to day as a natural way of behaving and doing business).

Our second approach is derived from the research of Drath et al (2). In their research, they discovered that most ‘acts’ of leadership can be codified into 3 areas, namely direction, alignment and commitment (DAC). In our own leadership development work with clients, we have tested this hypothesis many times. And, we have consistently found that around 90% of leadership acts fall under one of these DAC domains.

So, our insight has been to use the AAPC Framework and codify each leadership act within DAC. Some illustrations are given below:

This process can help us ascertain how and where we as leaders are investing our time and energy. Are we overly focused on one of these domains? Are we neglecting one of them? What are the implications?

Our experience tells us that most leaders won’t be totally comfortable across all three domains; but as a leadership team, we are better placed to get good coverage right across the board.

In summary, these two integrated approaches can show us what leadership work is actually being done as a result of our development program (AAPC) and what organizational purpose is being served (DAC).

(1) ‘What Makes Leadership Development Programs Succeed?’ By Ayse Yemiscigil, Dana Born, Horace Ling in Harvard Business Review, February 28, 2023.

(2) ‘Direction, alignment, commitment: Toward a more integrative ontology of leadership.’ By Wilfred G. Drath et al. in The Leadership Quarterly (Elsevier)