Transforming Leadership Through Novel Training, Part 1
Leadership training accounts for annual overall company expenditures in the United States of approximately $92.3 billion. One study found that more companies than ever now spend over 41% of their training budget on leadership development. The results of all this training, however, remain a question mark. Are leaders making a difference? If so, what difference are they making? Is that the goal of the training? Is training the answer?
Of course, Carpe Diem has an interest in this issue and believes that training is part of the answer. But leadership encompasses so much more than skills learned in most training. It entails how leaders are selected, the mission of the organization, the corporate culture, the needs of the consumer – to name a few.
Studies have repeatedly concluded that leadership in the United States is wanting. For instance, employee engagement fell to 34% in 2021.1That means that 66% of employees are either disengaged or actively disengaged. (For the record, that makes the ratio of disengaged workers to engaged workers, 2.1:1.) Leaders play a major role in that statistic.2 Research consistently indicates that the primary reason why employees leave organizations, and why they are disengaged, is the manager or the supervisor. Marcus Buckingham proclaimed in First, Break All the Rules, “People leave managers, not companies.” That stands to reason since managers and supervisors make up the face of an organization to their reports. Just as troubling, however, is that managers’ engagement dropped 7%, based in part on lack of clarity in expectations and the absence of someone to encourage and support their own growth. The Great Resignation, in which 4.4. million workers resigned in September 2021 alone, has hobbled businesses and confounded the Fed, which has tried to cool inflation only to see hiring increase dramatically, undoing its measured plans. The relationship between these ginormous departures and employee disengagement is not yet entirely clear, but since many leaders are ineffective or narcissistic, employee morale takes a hit. Carpe Diem’s unique workshop, “The Road to Employee and Supervisor Satisfaction: Employee Engagement and The Psychological Contract”, provides actionable tools designed to address employee engagement and to foster the creation of notably improved workplace relationships. It is clear that the investment in leadership training has not yielded the results sought. Something different is warranted, and that might call for shifting the managerial mindset about employees in general, a central theme in Carpe Diem’s “Managing People” program.
The second part of this post, “The Managerial Mindset and Leadership Development”, will address this theme.
1 J. Harter, “U.S. Employee Engagement Drops for First Year in a Decade”, (Gallup.com, Jan. 7, 2022), at https://www.gallup.com/workplace/388481/employee-engagement-drops-first-year-decade.aspx
2 “Retention Report: How Employers Caused the Great Resignation” (Work Institute 2022), at https://info.workinstitute.com/hubfs/2022%20Retention%20Report/2022%20Retention%20Report%20-%20Work%20Institute.pdf
