I am not a plant parent. Give a plant parent and I identical plants and the depth of my incompetence would be on full display. The plant parent would nurture theirs to health and vitality. Mine would wither under my un-watchful eye.

Two plants with two very different destinies. One grew into its potential. The other did not.

A plant has one purpose: grow into maturity. The plants under the watch and care of a plant parent flourish. They grow in size and stature over time. The plants under my watch have the same purpose. They just don’t get to actualize it.

Most things have a purpose. Aristotle used the term “telos” to explain the end goal, end, or purpose of something. It describes the fullest expression of something for which it exists. For example, the purpose of a knife is to cut well. One of our kitchen knives is dull and in desperate need of sharpening. By sharpening it, I’m not changing its telos. I’m actualizing it. The sharp edge gives the knife a fuller expression of its telos.

Aristotle believed humans possess a specific telos—“eudaemonia.” It’s often translated “happiness”, but that doesn’t capture the deeper meaning. Aristotle didn’t have a feeling of bliss in mind. He meant something more like “living a life well.” Eudaemonia isn’t a destination, or something we accomplish. It describes someone who lives a life of flourishing.

Human Flourishing

In the same way that plant parents adjust the soil, temperature and light that enable their “children” to flourish, humans tend to flourish under specific conditions as well. In 2021 Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program partnered with Baylor, Gallup, and the Center for Open Science to form the Global Flourishing Study. Other institutions of higher learning have partnered with them in the project, including Westmont College, in Montecito, California, where all three of our kids attended school.

The longitudinal study tracks 200,000 people from 22 countries across the following six domains:

1. Happiness and life satisfaction—the positivity a person feels toward their life as a whole

2. Physical and mental health—the well-being they experience physically and mentally

3. Meaning and purpose—the sense of direction and significance a person experiences

4. Character and virtue—the integrity, honesty, and moral consistency they practice

5. Close social relationships—the quality and depth of their personal connections

6. Financial and material stability—the resources a person has to address their needs

The Human Flourishing program released several waves of findings that included several notable surprises:

• Several middle-income countries (Indonesia, Mexico, and the Philippines) scored higher on purpose, meaning, and social connection than wealthier nations, which challenges the assumption that wealth contributes to higher levels of flourishing.

• Young adults, between the ages of 18 and 24, reported lower levels of flourishing than their older adult counterparts across many countries, including the United States, Germany, Australia, and Brazil. This represents a reversal of a typical pattern of adults experiencing lower levels of well-being mid-life.

• Religious affiliation and participation showed a strong association with human flourishing.

These domains don’t offer a prescription we can follow like a recipe that guarantees that we flourish. They’re descriptions of the kinds of things that tend to enable the fullest expression of an individual human being.

Still, we find the Human Flourishing Program contains a set of clear indicators we can consider as we seek to help ourselves and others flourish. Whether we’re a parent, an employer, a community member, we can use these domains to elucidate the degree to which we’re cultivating these conditions. This doesn’t mean that creating these conditions will cause human flourishing, so much as it will make it as difficult as possible to keep people from flourishing.

“I’m a lifer”

Everything was in place for Justin to continue his family legacy of alcoholism, violence, and imprisonment. He confided to me that several of his relatives are still active members in a motorcycle gang, and that if I even “needed a favor”, he could hook me up.

(In full disclosure, I’m blending actual details from a couple different people I’ve worked with in order to preserve their confidentiality.)

I’ll admit that Justin intimidated me for the first couple years that we knew each other. His stature looks more fitting for a bar bouncer than an executive. When we started working together, he rarely participated in conversations with his team, and would rather “just get to work” than attend our meetings.

Then came his divorce and custody battle, recovery from alcoholism, and fighting to retain ownership of his beloved home in the country. Rather than grow bitter, he softened through the experience. He showed up differently. Rather than sitting arms crossed at meetings, he began to participate and demonstrate levels of transparency no one had ever seen before. It didn’t go unnoticed by the rest of the team, nor the CEO of the company.

His metamorphosis showed up in the way he led others as well. Rather than referring to them as “idiots” and other insults not fit to print, he demonstrated genuine regard and patience toward his employees. Instead of barking orders at them, he came alongside them, and invested in their development.

Several years into our work together, Justin came into a meeting and recounted an incident in which an employee’s negligence contributed to the company losing a valued customer. Old Justin would have unleashed a firestorm on the employee and fired him on the spot. Instead, he took some time to gather himself and have a conversation with the employee about what caused the mistake and how they might avoid it in the future.

Justin receives weekly inquiries from competitors trying to poach him from his current company. He routinely turns away offers that promise more pay and better benefits. They want Justin not only for his performance and leadership qualities. They want him because he raises the bar for integrity and character wherever he goes.

I recently asked Justin why he stayed with this company instead of working somewhere else. He had a one-word response: “Growth,” he said. “I’ve become a different person working here, and it’s a place where I continue to grow. I can’t imagine going anywhere else. I’m a lifer.”

The Ecological vs. Technical Mindset

Every company wants people like Justin, but instead of cultivating conditions, they default to programs, workshops, and conferences. They mistakenly believe that better techniques will make better leaders.

Justin’s company takes a different approach. They provide conditions that people like Justin have never experienced before. In the place of typical training opportunities, Justin’s company creates an environment. Their leaders think like ecologists and approach the development of people like plant parents, not technicians. They know that if the right conditions are in place, people will flourish. In their absence, people won’t.

Instead of spending budgets on conferences and outside training, they invest in developing people in-house. And rather than development functioning as something separate from their daily operations, they’ve integrated into every aspect of day-to-day work. The company’s efforts create an environment that makes it as difficult as possible for people not to flourish.

Not surprisingly, the conditions they’ve cultivated align with the domains from the Global Human Flourishing project. Some examples include:

• Regular surveys help the company gauge employee happiness and satisfaction

• Ongoing initiatives that promote and support mental and physical health

• A clear set of principles that encourage the development of character and virtue

• Mentorship opportunities at work provide opportunities for connection and advancement

• The most competitive compensation and benefits packages in their industry.

Much like the right conditions enable a plant to thrive, this company creates an environment that enables people like Justin to actualize their telos.

Conditions for Flourishing

The conditions that enable a plant to flourish don’t result from happenstance. They require deliberate, intentional cultivation. The same is true for people. We thrive in homes, communities, and places of work that have certain conditions. And we feel limited or even oppressed in environments that lack these conditions.

The sobering reality is that we influence every environment we enter. Our presence and practices create conditions that shape us and the people around us in one way or another. What kind of conditions do I create? Do people tend to flourish in my presence? These questions cut to the core of who we are as individuals.

Of course the greatest thing we can offer people is to promote our own flourishing. If we seek to cultivate conditions that help us grow, we model a life well lived for others as well.

But here we need to make a critical distinction, lest we equate a life well lived with the kind of blemish-free, curated, falsified schlock that populates social media feeds. Authentic human flourishing often reveals itself through the stuff of life that’s unfit to post: tragedy, struggle, and failure. It’s in and through these moments that we gain glimpses of our true telos and the true meaning of happiness.

I dedicate this article to the memory of my father, Bruce Elroy Robinson, who died this week at the age of 94. He modeled for me what it looks like to grow in eudaemonia with each passing year.

The street, shrubs, and trees lay shrouded beneath a blanket. Was it snow? What else could it be? But it was May, and whatever was floating down from the sky wasn’t white. It was gray. It wasn’t a snow globe outside my window. It looked more like we were under a pepper shaker.

My mom must have heard I was awake, and came into the room. She told me that Mount Saint Helens had erupted and that everything between the mountain and the Portland Metropolitan area was engulfed in a cloud of ash.

Though news reports on the television in our living room warned about the dangers of going out in the ash, I promptly threw on a paper mask my dad used for woodworking. Wrapping the flimsy yellow elastic strap around my head, I ran out the front door and joined my friends from the neighborhood. We ran around and played like it was the first snow of the year.

Desolation and Destruction

The eruption of Mount Saint Helens in May of 1980 released 24 megatons of energy, the equivalent of 1600 atomic bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima. Its initial blast ripped through every lake, river, tree, and bush in its path at approximately 670 miles per hour. Within a matter of minutes a landscape that once teemed with life lay dead in the wake of the blast.

The prevailing scientific models of the day predicted that Saint Helens and the areas affected by the blast would remain lifeless moonscapes for generations to come. But that’s not what happened. Scientists who returned to the site found fireweed poking up above the thick layer of ash within days of the eruption. Not surprisingly, they discovered that plant life returned quicker in areas of the thinnest ash cover where they could “breathe” enough to grow and proliferate.

As it turns out, had a number of factors not converged at the same time, Mount Saint Helens may have remained void of life. For example, animal and plant life returned quickly to lakes and streams that were still shielded by a layer of protective ice. Had the eruption taken place in July or August, they would have been more exposed to the blast and likely would have remained lifeless for much longer. Root systems that lay buried beneath soil also survived, enabling plants like fireweed to rebound shortly after the eruption.

The return of life accelerated during the weeks and months that followed. Saint Helens now stands ringed with trees, streams, and lakes, much like it did before the eruption, a testimony to life’s persistence. It illustrates that even amidst mass destruction, life wants to persist and can, so long as certain conditions are in place.

Rising from Ashes

Duncan Campbell was left alone most of his childhood in a state of poverty and neglect. During his TEDx Portland talk he tells the story of waking in the middle of the night, wandering through his family’s house only to discover that his parents weren’t home. He got dressed and walked the streets of Northeast Portland looking for them. Soon he came upon a bakery worker on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette. He asked Duncan where he was going.“I’m looking for my parents,” Duncan said.

The worker took him inside and called the police. The police recognized Duncan. They had been to his house on several occasions to break up fights between his parents. Duncan rode in the police car to a tavern. They walked together into the bar, made their way through chairs, stools, and the fog of smoke and stale beer where he found his parents sitting at the bar. They didn’t even acknowledge Duncan as their son.

Duncan was four years old at the time.

This and numerous other experiences led Duncan, even at a young age, to vow that he would do something to help children avoid the childhood that he experienced. “I knew that I didn’t want another child to ever feel the way I did,” he says during his talk.

With the help of a few teachers, coaches, and mentors along the way, Campbell raised himself. He shares how a pivotal moment came when his high school counselor told him, “Duncan, you can be more than what most people think you can be.”

And he was right.

Duncan graduated from high school and worked his way into becoming a CPA with Arthur Andersen. Then in 1983 he founded one of the first timber investment firms in the world, which he eventually sold in order to dedicate his life to helping other affected by poverty, neglect, and abuse.

In 1993 he formed Friends of the Children, an unconventional program designed to break the cycle of generational poverty by pairing full-time paid mentors with at risk youth from kindergarten up through high school graduation.

In the years since its inception, Friends of the Children has helped thousands of youth avoid the juvenile justice system. More than nine out of ten children in the program pursue post-secondary education. Best of all, these children don’t feel the loneliness and hopelessness that nearly claimed Duncan.

Life wants to live

Even when it’s buried beneath heaps of ash, when circumstances for survival seem bleak, we see within nature and people like Duncan Campbell an indefatigable persistence to flourish. Life wants to live.

But we need not only look at exceptional circumstances for evidence. We’re surrounded by common everyday examples in ourselves and others. We all know that feeling when we feel like we’ve woken from a stupor and come to life. Whether it came from reconnecting with a friend, an outdoor adventure, or a period of solitude, we’re acquainted with the sense that something within us feels more alive.

I remember how from an early age my middle daughter would run outside when she heard the sound of a heavy rain on the roof of our house. I’d hear her feet patter down the hallway and watch as she rushed out the back door and stand beneath the shower, her arms and mouth open to the sky beneath the rain.

What drew her outside? What caused her to leave whatever else she was doing at the time and run outside? Something within her knew that rain storm offered the chance to feel more alive. The life within her wanted to be more alive.

We all have our own version of rushing outside to get soaked during a rainstorm. These are the conditions by which we flourish. Certain conditions promoted the return of life soon after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. A few caring adults in the life of Duncan Campbell enabled his deep longing for life to surface and prosper.

Conditions for Life

Unfortunately, rather than viewing people as capable of being “more than what most people think” they can be, much of our world seems bent on making people less than they can be. Whether through various forms of control, or through neglect and abdication, the net result remains the same—a diminished sense of self.

We all have the opportunity and responsibility to cultivate conditions within ourselves and the world we live in that enable life to flourish. Part of this includes removing barriers that inhibit lives that want to live. It begins with seeing ourselves and others being more, much more, than what people may think.

Though the conditions may vary depending on the person, what remains constant in every person is an inexplicable draw toward life. It may be lost, buried, or forgotten, but let’s not mistake dormancy for absence.

What are those conditions that summon life from within us? And what can we do to cultivate those conditions so that we help others, and ourselves, experience life more fully?

I’m struggling to think of any questions that more accurately reflect our responsibility to the people we know and love.

I’m coming up empty.

But what’s the source of disruption that takes place at the level of the process? Why is it that certain interactions go off the rails? Yes it stems from a shift in how people interact with one another, but I want to uncover the deeper cause.

I’ll return to the conversation that went off the rails between me and another person that I introduced in the last article. The true source of the conflict wasn’t anything anyone else could have detected because it arose from within me and the other person in the room. That’s where the interaction broke down. In retrospect, I wish I recognized this in the moment and had the presence of mind to address what was actually happening within me before it derailed what was actually happening in the room. No doubt doing so could have salvaged the interaction and the relationship.

Unanchored State

Conversations that go off the rails between people result from one or more individuals in the conversation going off the rails.

I began the conversation with the other person in a grounded state. I felt present, curious, accessible, even excited about what we were going to explore together. But as the interaction evolved over the course of several hours I began to lose my mooring, and grew increasingly ungrounded and disoriented.

That shift began when I noticed the other person growing increasingly agitated. He began to pace the room and elevate his voice, but I couldn’t understand why. Edwin Friedman describes a well-differentiated person as someone who isn’t infected by another person’s anxiety. I apparently lacked the self-differentiation that would have vaccinated me against it.

Instead, quite apart from my conscious awareness, I had gradually retreated into a fortress of self preservation. I had gone off the rails internally. Unfortunately I only recognized this reality in retrospect, well after the interaction devolved.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now see that the way I was engaging in the conversation no longer supported my ability to engage with the content of our discussion. The only way for me to successfully address the conflict taking place between me and the other person was to resolve the conflict that was happening between me and myself. Apart from this internal work, any attempt to regain a constructive conversation would prove fruitless.

Our ability to remain in a non-anxious grounded state enables us to navigate challenging conversations. But when we lose our footing, we become volatile, reactive, and more concerned about survival than connection. We’re no longer able to discuss the topic at hand with objectivity, not when we’re more concerned about reinforcing our sense of safety.

No problem, right? It sounds so simple: just cultivate a non-anxious presence and everything will be okay. But as it turns out, the path from an ungrounded anxious state to one that’s anchored isn’t quite as easy as we would hope. It requires us to retrace our steps from the point of departure.

“The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’ — or else not.”

—C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

And what’s the nature of the mutters? They surface when I confront myself with what I’m actually responding to in the moment. This kind of honest assessment typically reveals things like fear, anger, loss, and hurt. Apart from telling the truth to myself about what’s actually happening within me, I’ll continue to displace my focus outside of myself onto other people and circumstances. This perpetuates my unanchored state, and ensures that the conversation will remain off the rails.

The Activation Triangle

The Activation Triangle helps me recognize when my internal reaction doesn’t match what’s happening in the moment. When I detect a disparity between my reaction and what the situation called for, I know something else is at play: a fear, a wound, a loss, that needs my attention.

Reactions fall somewhere on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of their severity, where 1 represents a lack of internal activation, and 10 represents the strongest reaction possible. Zone 1, or roughly between 1 and 4, represents a state of Presence. I experience the least amount of activation in this state. Zone 2, Activation, refers to situations that produce moderate and elevated levels of activation, the range between about 5 and 8. A spirited conversation, a competition, or even riding a roller coaster might precipitate this level of activation.

Most situations call for a reaction that falls somewhere within Zone 1 or 2. Once a person moves to a 9 or 10, they enter Zone 3 — a state of Disconnection where they lose their tether to reality. It's what psychologists refer to as dissociation. They’ve progressed from a state of Presence and Activation in Zones 1 and 2 into a state in which they don’t feel or act like themselves in Zone 3. Some may not even remember what they did or said.

Notice that activation travels in two directions: hyper or hypo. If hyper is fight or flight, hypo is freeze. Hyper reactions show up when someone gets big. They may raise their voice, become aggressive, hurl insults, or intimidate another person. Or they may flee the situation as quickly as possible. Hypo reactions work the opposite direction. A person gets as small as possible. They may stop speaking altogether, and physically shrink back from a situation. In a state of Disconnection, people often toggle between both extremes.

The degree of activation isn’t the issue. Groups and individuals go off the rails when a person’s reaction no longer matches the situation, which is what happened to me in the example above. Like most conflicts, ours centered around our recollection of previous conversations. For example, he claimed that we never discussed the 3-year strategy and budget that I presented several months before. Even when I produced the slide deck I had shared with him, he claimed he’d never seen it. I felt like I was entering a reality distortion field.

That’s when I began to feel myself go off the rails and enter Zone 3. I grew more angry and withdrawn by the minute. The process of the conversation—the how—no longer aligned with the content we were discussing—the what. Had I had the objectivity in the moment, I would recognize that I was hovering around a 9, when the situation really only called for a 5 or 6. I would have noticed my shallow breaths, rigid body language, and sharp tone of voice, clear indications that I was in an activated state.

In that moment, the other person said or did something that accessed a pre-existing fear, hurt, loss or other vulnerability within me. That’s what I was actually reacting to. But the discomfort I was experiencing in the room paled in comparison to the discomfort that awaited me if I told the truth to myself about what was actually accessed within me. This explains why I distanced myself from the truth of what was actually going on and focused instead on blaming the other person.

An honest assessment of my reaction would have revealed that I thought this person and I had a trusting relationship, when in fact it wasn’t anything of the sort. The thought of admitting this and letting go of the relationship felt like a loss. Had I possessed the presence of mind and courage in the moment, I would have acknowledged the reality of the relationship and grieved the loss. That would have let me kindly mitigate our relational damage and draw our conversation to a close. The conversation would have likely remained off the tracks — but I would have been able to get myself back on the rails.

While I chose to ignore the truth in the moment, it caught up with me later. Truth has a habit of doing that.

Self Leadership

In the same way that an effective leader tends to the process in the room instead of getting sucked into the content of the conversation, that same leader needs to demonstrate true self leadership by tending to his or her own internal processes. In fact, as I’ve pointed out here, self leadership is what makes it possible to lead others well. No other leadership quality rivals the importance of a leader being able to work with themselves in this way.

The person who commits to leading themselves and others in this way works at the level of process — within themselves, a group, or even an entire organization. While everyone around them gets swept away by the particulars of what someone said or did, this person has the eyes to see something the others miss. They recognize that what’s happening within and between people is the true determinant of relationships and interactions. They have the ability to work with themselves to remain grounded, which allows those around them to regain their footing as well.

This awareness transforms the way they show up in interactions throughout the day. Rather than a series of transactions, this person cultivates a healthy relational process that fosters mutual safety, trust, and respect. This process transforms and sustains a completely different paradigm, one in which people experience a sense of connection, belonging, and collaboration.

More than the ability to listen, or cast a vision, it’s a leader’s ability to work at the level of process that matters most. But like all skills, it requires practice to recognize process within ourselves and others. Those who commit to the practice will discover and develop a rare ability to keep themselves and others from going off the rails.

The way a team works has an enormous influence on what it can do. The process, the methods, the practices, the approach, the discipline, the trust, the communication style, the pace. The way—the how—is foundational and fundamental.

— Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO of 37signals

I recognized how I could have salvaged the conversation, but it was too late. A team of us were talking through a strategic direction. One person in the group kept advancing a position and raising questions that I thought we had already addressed. I grew increasingly confused and frustrated. I felt my ears turn hot and I began to sweat. I wondered to myself, “Why are we retracing ground that we already discussed? Am I going crazy?”

What I did next sealed the fate of the conversation. It not only ensured that the conversation wouldn’t move forward, it risked harming my relationship with the other person—I began to recount our previous conversations on this issue. I said things like, “Do you remember when we talked about this three months ago, and I explained why my proposal accounts for your questions and concerns?” In other words, I focused on the content of our conversations thinking that if I just stated it clearly enough, we could regain our footing and move forward.

It only got worse.

Our mutual frustration with each other grew until we both disengaged from the conversation, and each other. The rest of the room fell silent. We made attempts to say we ought to re-engage at a later date, but the damage was already done. That conversation never happened.

On and Off the Rails

What happened in this interaction mirrors what happens to any train going down the rails of a track. Both rails have to remain in perfect parallel to one another in order for the train to safely travel. If one or both rails separate, the train will run off the rails.

Conversations follow the same principle. One rail is made up of what people are talking about. In the example above, it was the strategic direction we were discussing. Think of the content as the transcript from a conversation. It includes the actual words and phrases that people exchange with one another. The other rail is how they’re talking about the content. It’s the process that unfolds during the interaction. This includes things like tone, volume, and body language.

Like train tracks, the how and what remain parallel to one another in most conversations. This enables the way people discuss an issue to harmonize with the topic of discussion. The people involved are able to exchange ideas, perspectives, and information without incident. This also allows the parties involved to clear up minor points of confusion.

This explains why healthy conversations can take place even when people get impassioned about an issue. They may raise their voices, or grow silent at times, but the train of the conversation is able to continue toward its destination because the process of the interaction supports the content.

Trains go off the rails when the rails lack alignment. In the same way conversations go off the rails when the way people communicate departs from the content. The how of the interaction no longer matches the what. Since the rails no longer align, the conversation lacks the support it needs to continue and will invariably screech to a stop.

Back on Track

I recognized the signs that my conversation in the above example had gone off the rails. I felt increasingly disoriented and impatient with the other person. If I had the presence of mind and honesty in the moment, I would have confessed to feeling out of control.

Most people sense when a conversation goes off the rails. They too feel disoriented and out of control, which is why we tend to focus on the content of a conflict. It gives us a sense of control. This explains why people double down on what they said or didn’t say. They think that restating their position will somehow move the conversation forward. But once the train leaves the tracks, any attempt to clarify the content will only contribute to the growing polarization between the individuals involved. While it may provide a temporary sense of control, focusing on content sets a feedback loop in place that accelerates the demise of the conversation.

Had I tended to the process of the conflict instead of the content, the conversation may have gone a different direction. For example, if I had made an observation like, “I’m noticing how stating and defending our own perspectives isn’t moving the conversation forward.” Or I could have admitted, “I’ve been incredibly defensive in this conversation and unwilling to entertain anyone else’s perspective but my own.” Both of those comments address a process that needs fixing, as opposed to the transcript.

Tending to the process doesn’t mean that the train of the conversation will magically jump back on the tracks, but it will reset it and invite everyone involved to engage in a different, more productive process. Certain conversations require multiple resets as the parties involved continue to run the train off the rails by defaulting to content.

This ability to work with people at the level of process may be the single most powerful skill for anyone who leads people. I call it a skill because you can improve it with practice. Those who commit to learning it will notice they improve their ability to identify the process that’s going on in the room. This ability to recognize and work with people at a process level enables leaders to tend to what’s actually going on in the room. While others may get swept away by the content in the room, the leaders that work with process will find they’re able to remain a non-anxious presence others can draw from.

It’s bad for people and bad for profit. For all its claims to improve companies, it’s the force undoing them. It’s a mythical beast.

I’m not referring to the title “manager” or “middle management” as seen on an org chart. I’m talking about management as a mindset. An orientation. A conviction about how business gets done.

Twenty years to recognize that management works in shadows. It’s invisible as the air we breathe, only worse. Air sustains us. Management lulls us to sleep like carbon monoxide.

Twenty years to recognize what was right in front of me. Twenty years working with talented leaders, watching some thrive while others struggled, but unable to explain why. Twenty years to detect the beast.

Now I see it everywhere. How can we miss the wreckage—overworked and under-utilized individuals, fractured families, and underperforming companies. Management manifests mediocrity. It creates a race to the middle in which high performers try to deliver results while breathing through a straw.

All we’ve known is management-induced suffocation. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to take a deep breath.

Now I see the beast. Now I know how to recognize it. Now I know how to confront and defeat it.

Still, even in the face of evidence, it persists.

Why the Mythology Persists

Why does management persist despite its damage? Because it offers what all mythologies offer: a coherent way to understand human complexity while offering the illusion that we can control it. Greek gods explained the weather. Management explains people. Neither is real, but both let us pretend to control the levers.

Management promises control. Frederick Winslow Taylor pioneered this promise in the early 20th Century. He reasoned that if you could train horses to act like humans, why can’t we train humans to act like machines? Taylor called it “scientific management.” Most still call it leadership.

The word “management” originated in the 1560s from the Italian “manége”—literally, “to handle, train, or direct a horse.” Within a decade the meaning expanded to handling people, to “control or direct by administrative ability any sort of business.”1 The aristocratic class applied the term to the horses they owned and the estates they managed.2

When the Industrial Revolution demanded supervision of hundreds or thousands of workers in factories and coal mines, Taylor systematized the horse training metaphor. He used time studies, standardized motions, and constant supervision to optimize human productivity. The metaphor remained intact—the purpose of management was to control the behavior of others through sustained systematic attention and correction.3

Taylor confessed his methods were “directly antagonistic to the old idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work.” Two principles follow from this:

1. Workers are incapable of regulating their own work.

2. Managers must regulate workers and establish dependency.

These principles persist today. Amazon warehouse workers carry scanners—called “The Boss”—that track their every movement, time each task to the second, and automatically flag “time off task.”4 Taylor’s assembly line transformed natural human motion into prescribed robotic movement. The Boss has the same objective: train humans to behave like machines.

But most manifestations of the management mindset evade detection. They hide in plain sight in leadership decisions and attitudes. The best way to identify management in all its forms: look for leaders who view employees as extensions of their will. They may not use “The Boss,” but they leverage incentives, performance evaluations, and disciplinary options to “regulate” employee behavior.

The People Paradox

Management arose to solve what I call The People Paradox: How can companies maximize the upside of human capital while mitigating the challenges of human complexity?

Of all assets in a company, humans are the most complex. Computers don’t call in sick. Furniture doesn’t argue about strategy. When equipment breaks, you repair or replace it. Performance remains predictable.

Not so with humans.

Our complexity introduces uncertainty into the workplace. Leaders can’t predict human performance with the same confidence they have in other company assets. This complexity compounds exponentially when humans work together. Teams form unique subcultures and dynamics that amplify unpredictability. Now imagine a leader in a larger company charged with an entire division—a collection of teams and leaders leading other leaders who are leading other leaders, and so on. The complexity compounds at every level so as to render the notion of control preposterous.

Leaders step into this tangled network of human complexity, attempting to guide people toward business objectives. The problem: stewardship of these complex human systems exceeds their capacity for control no matter the size. Management holds appeal because its systems and practices help leaders manufacture a sense of control and predictability. But that’s just the management myth at work.

Still, many default to the management myth.

Management doesn’t resolve The People Paradox. Rather than creating cultures where people bring their best, it fosters conformity and compliance. It neutralizes human complexity and in doing so disincentivizes human contribution. Companies get less from their most important asset, not more. The net result?

Engineered mediocrity that we’ve come to accept as the norm.

This is why the management mythology persists. We’re drawn to what it provides: a coherent paradigm of reality and a means of influencing it. Management offers leaders a way to understand and influence human nature—a phenomenon whose complexity surpasses weather and wars. The fact that management practices corrode the single greatest asset in companies escapes the attention of most leaders.

But not all.

Awakening from the Myth

Management is the default setting in our modern age. Fortunately, I’ve had the pleasure of working with leaders who depart from it. Most don’t realize they’re doing something different. They’re charting a different path and have adopted different practices that promote human flourishing among those they lead. The difference isn’t technique. It’s orientation. Where management seeks to regulate, these leaders seek to activate. Where management assumes control, these leaders create conditions.

Leaders awaken when they stop trying to regulate their employees and start creating conditions for flourishing. The shift sounds simple. It’s not. It begins with an acknowledgement—that the complexity of human nature surpasses our capacity for control. Any suggestion to the contrary reinforces the myth.

What might the alternative look like?

Leaders stop asking “How do I get my employees to do X?” and start asking “What does this person need to bring their best?” One question assumes control. The other assumes trust.

This shift returns the burden of responsibility back where it belongs: with the individual. Taylor stripped employees of their personal responsibility and gave it to the leader. Leaders who create conditions for flourishing reverse this act of thievery.

These conditions include boundaries, expectations, and incentives that provide the employee the structure, freedom, and empowerment to bring their best each day. Not freedom from accountability—freedom within it. The leader still sets direction, still holds people accountable for outcomes. But the how, the daily regulation of work, belongs to the person doing it.

“The lovelessness of managerialism is like a pillow held firmly over the face of culture.” - Matthew Crawford5

Twenty years to see he’s right. Twenty years to see that for those committed to management, traditional leadership development just offers more levers to “handle” employees instead of letting them breathe.

AI will automate vast swaths of human labor. The management response will be more regulation, tighter control, better measurement. This will fail. Leaders that cling to management will fail. Entire companies will fail.This fate awaits those who fail to recognize the myth.

There will be a small group of leaders that seize a generational opportunity. Here’s why.

The advent of AI ensures that technology will quickly outpace our ability to reduce humans to machines. Each day produces more evidence that we’re being out machined by machines. This means we no longer need humans to behave like machines. Like never before we need humans to behave like humans. The few that recognize the edge they gain by restoring humanity to people will capitalize on this opportunity.

AI spells the death knell for management. That’s good news for those that recognize it. As this opportunity grows more significant each day, it’s a wonder anyone would pass it up. It’s a wonder anyone would cling to the management myth.

Still, most will. Why? I look forward to exploring this question next time.

“The problem isn’t commitment—most leaders are serious about developing people. The problem is integration. They lack a unifying process they can own, one that connects learning to real work and real growth.”

Summary

Companies know they must develop their leaders to attract, engage, and retain talent. The business case is obvious: without strong leadership, performance, retention, and culture suffer.

Yet the way most organizations pursue leadership development is broken. They spend billions on workshops, certifications, and retreats that inspire temporarily but rarely change anything long term. Leaders themselves often grow jaded, even resentful, when the next “flavor of the month” (FOTM) program is rolled out.1

The leadership development industry thrives on this cycle. New frameworks, models, and tools arrive each year, promising transformation but usually delivering little more than new jargon. Over time, the accumulation of these disconnected efforts creates cynicism, fatigue, and wasted resources.

The alternative is a fundamentally different category of leadership development: Generative Leadership Development (GLD). GLD is not another framework to bolt onto the pile. It is a process—a system for discovering, co-creating, integrating, and sustaining leadership growth from within an organization. GLD offers the antidote to the FOTM cycle and establishes a path leaders can actually trust.

The Flavor-of-the-Month Problem

The sheer volume of leadership content is part of the problem. Conferences, books, podcasts, and keynote speakers flood the market with competing philosophies and vocabularies. Leaders are constantly invited to adopt new frameworks, only to see them fade as another model captures executive attention.

The typical pattern looks like this:

1. A company adopts a leadership framework and experiences a short burst of clarity and enthusiasm.

2. After initial use, leaders hit a wall—the model has no further depth to offer.

3. Executives seek out the next framework, which is either layered onto the old one or used to replace it entirely.

Over time, leaders become fluent in multiple languages of leadership without ever mastering one. The result is a patchwork of frameworks, each carrying its own tools and jargon.

The leaders subjected to these cycles know they are simply being asked to play along until the next wave arrives. One younger leader put it bluntly:

“I dread when our CEO comes back from a retreat. I know he’ll introduce another leadership model that we’ll do for a while before it’s replaced by the next one.”

The problem isn’t commitment—most leaders are serious about developing people. The problem is integration. They lack a unifying process they can own, one that connects learning to real work and real growth.

The Three Flavors of the Leadership Development Delusion

Most FOTM programs fall into one of three categories:

1. One-Offs

Workshops, Motivational Speakers, and Leadership Event Days

Annual or quarterly “leadership days” and bootcamps deliver energy, inspiration, and sometimes useful skills. But the impact almost never lasts.

A Harvard Business Review analysis noted that only about 25% of senior managers believe training meaningfully affects business outcomes, citing systemic barriers that prevent application. Without reinforcement or integration, leaders quickly regress to the status quo.2

2. Products

Prepackaged Competency Models, Certifications, and Badges

This flavor prescribes lockstep pathways through a predetermined curriculum. Leaders march through modules, earn certificates, and check boxes.

The flaw is structural: these programs offer solutions without diagnosing organizational problems. They feel safe—popular, well-marketed, defensible—but they are decoupled from the leader’s actual challenges.

3. Potpourri

Book Clubs, Manuals, and Languages

Groups of leaders commit to reading books or manuals, layering new frameworks on top of existing ones. Without a coherent process, this introduces competing leadership languages.

Leaders end up speaking different dialects of leadership, which breeds confusion, inconsistency, and jargon creep.

What unites these three flavors? They all assume that if leaders consume good information, transformation will follow. But this assumption is false. Information without integration creates insight, not change.

That is the essence of the Leadership Development Delusion—the belief that inspiration and intention will translate into transformation.

Push vs. Pull: The Fault Line

Most leadership development still operates as a push system. Organizations prescribe curricula, march leaders through content, and reward completion with certificates.

The result is compliance, not growth. Leaders endure content that feels detached from the real problems they are responsible for solving.

By contrast, a pull system removes obstacles and creates conditions where leaders draw development into their daily work. Learning is contextual, voluntary, and directly tied to problems leaders are motivated to solve. Growth becomes the path of least resistance.

Read through the following descriptions. Which sounds more like your company’s approach to developing leaders?

• Push Approach

  • Prescribes set curricula and linear pathways

  • Content delivered externally, often generic

  • Focus on completion, certificates, and badges

  • Episodic: workshops, retreats, or one-off events

  • Compliance-driven, leaders endure content

  • Short-term bursts of insight, little follow-through

• Pull Approach

  • Emerges from real challenges leaders face

  • Development is co-created and contextual

  • Focus on application, integration, and results

  • Continuous: embedded in daily work and culture

  • Owner-driven, leaders draw learning in voluntarily

  • Sustainable growth, adaptive to evolving needs

How’d you do? If you’re like most leaders, your experience up to this point in your career resembles the push descriptors.

Generative Leadership Development (GLD)

Breaking the push cycle requires a new category of leadership development—Generative Leadership Development (GLD).

GLD is not about content; it is about process. It shifts leadership development from consumption to creation, from prescription to participation, from episodic training to embedded practice.

GLD rests on four pillars:

• Discovery – Surface real challenges and opportunities through discovery interviews, small groups, and surveys. Instead of guessing what leaders need, the company asks.

• Co-Creation – Leaders collaborate in designing their own development journey. Rather than impose an off-the-shelf curriculum, the organization builds a program that grows out of lived challenges.

• Integration – The program weaves leadership growth into the company’s vision, values, and systems. Development is not an extracurricular activity; it becomes embedded in how the company operates.

• Sustainability – Because leaders co-create it, the program adapts and evolves. It is not discarded when the next trend emerges. It becomes the company’s own leadership system, designed to endure.

The generative process creates a leadership culture that leaders trust because they built it themselves. It replaces the churn of FOTM with a single framework that matures with the organization.

GLD: A Category All to Itself

Traditional leadership development can be critiqued, refined, and improved, but it cannot escape its structural flaws. It is locked into the push model, dependent on content delivery, and wedded to episodic, external solutions.

GLD, by contrast, functions more like an organizational philosophy—akin to lean manufacturing or agile methodology—than a program.

It is not something you buy; it is something you build and sustain.

This distinction forges a new category for leadership development:

• Traditional leadership development depends on external, prescriptive, episodic, FOTM-driven content.

• Generative Leadership Development includes and process that’s internal, generative, continuous, co-created, and embedded.

This category shift reframes the decision for executives. The question is no longer:

“Which vendor’s framework should we adopt this year?”

But instead:

“How do we build our own leadership system that lasts?”

Hello GLD. Goodbye FOTM.

The demand for a generative alternative is rising, and the reasons are clear. Cynicism is growing. Leaders have seen too many cycles of frameworks come and go, leaving them skeptical of anything billed as “the next big thing.” They are hungry for an approach that won’t fade once the novelty wears off. GLD answers that hunger by offering something leaders can build and sustain themselves.

Budgets are also under increasing scrutiny. Executives want measurable ROI, not just certificates and applause at retreats. They know the dollars spent on leadership development must produce observable change in performance, retention, and culture. GLD makes ROI visible because it ties development directly to business goals and builds systems leaders actually use.

Retention is another urgent driver. Employees don’t leave companies—they leave bad managers. Leadership quality is now a make-or-break factor for talent.3 By embedding leadership development into daily rhythms rather than outsourcing it to the next FOTM, GLD strengthens the manager-employee relationship and addresses one of the biggest levers of retention.

Culture, too, is on the line. Leadership shapes engagement, trust, and performance more than any single initiative. Without capable leaders, culture efforts collapse into slogans and posters. GLD ensures leadership growth is not an add-on but the operating system that makes cultural transformation real.4

Finally, adaptability has become critical. Companies need leadership systems that evolve as fast as their environment. Traditional leadership development is too slow, too rigid, and too dependent on external providers. GLD, by contrast, is generative: it adapts as the company adapts, ensuring leadership keeps pace with complexity.

Taken together, these factors show why leaders are ready for GLD. It speaks to the pain points they feel daily and offers a process they can trust to deliver sustainable growth.

The Future is Generative

The leadership development industry thrives on novelty. But leaders don’t need novelty—they need growth that endures.

GLD replaces the cycle of flavors with a framework that is both timeless and adaptive.

When organizations implement GLD, they discover that leadership development stops being something “done to” leaders. It becomes something leaders do for themselves, with their people, and for their company’s future.

It is not another box to check; it is the system that underpins how the company grows.

A Final Word

Recent trends in leadership development indicate the era of FOTM leadership is ending. The era of generative leadership has begun.

GLD isn’t just an improvement on existing leadership development. It is a different category entirely—one designed to create the kind of leaders companies actually need in a world where change is constant, trust is fragile, and culture is everything.

Subsequent articles expound on each element of the GLD approach and how to integrate it into your company.

I’ve explained how a preoccupation with information, insights, and inspiration perpetuates the Leadership Development Delusion. In this essay, I introduce a second explanation for why leadership development fails to develop leaders—it relies on methods that worked in an industrial economy but lack relevance today.

Arms Full of Garbage

My family and I visited Disneyland several years ago. During one of our days in the park, we decided to stake out a spot to watch the fireworks that take place each night. We purchased takeout and enjoyed our picnic dinner together.

As the evening grew darker, hundreds of other park guests gathered around us. I realized at that point that I needed to find a garbage can to dispose of our dinner wrappers, bags, and cups. With so many people surrounding us, there may have been a receptacle ten feet from us, but I wouldn’t have been able to see it. I resigned myself to bear-hugging our garbage throughout the duration of the show.

As the music came up to signal the beginning of the show, I noticed a teenage Disney employee walking through the crowd in our direction. Since my arms were preoccupied, I bobbed back and forth like a buoy, trying to get his attention.

It worked. He knew a dad in distress when he saw one. As he walked toward me, I called out, “Can you point me to the nearest garbage can?” He didn’t say a word. Instead, he opened his arms like he was going to give me a hug and scooped up all of my garbage.

“Here, let me take that for you,” he said.

He turned and disappeared into the crowd. I was dumbfounded.

Disney employs over 200,000 people. How does a company that size train a teenager to willingly—even joyfully—carry away a stranger’s garbage? He could have ignored my plea for help, or directed me to the nearest garbage can. Instead, he scooped it up for me and freed me to enjoy the show with my family.

Concrete vs. Catalytic Competence

The Disney employee demonstrated a number of skills during our brief interaction:

1. Emotional intelligence: He could read the expression on my face as one of distress.

2. Situational awareness: He appreciated the fact that I was landlocked within the crowd.

3. Decision-making: In a matter of seconds, he had to determine a course of action.

4. Presence under pressure: Among the things vying for his attention, he prioritized my need.

5. Empathy in action: Rather than remain unaffected, he felt what I was feeling.

We typically refer to skills like this as “soft skills.” It’s a disservice to the value of these skills that we call them “soft.” As Seth Godin wrote, “We often call interpersonal and human skills ‘soft,’ which wrongly implies they’re optional or less important.” He wrote this in a Medium article entitled Let’s Stop Calling Them Soft Skills.

I agree. Let’s stop calling them “soft skills.” And let’s stop using “hard skills” while we’re at it.

Instead, I suggest we refer to Concrete Competence and Catalytic Competence. Concrete competencies describe a person’s ability to carry out discrete tasks. Catalytic competencies describe everything else. A catalyst facilitates change without being consumed in the process.

I suspect that the Disney employee, wherever he is now, has been recognized for these skills and is doing well. But it’s not just the hospitality industry that is searching for people with catalytic competence. Virtually every industry and company needs humans who know how to be, well, human.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

Human Machines

The American economy a century ago was largely based on manufacturing. We built stuff.

In the quest for optimal efficiency and productivity, one impediment stood out from all the rest: humans. For all of our aptitudes and intelligence, we humans are a complex, unpredictable, forgetful, and fragile bunch. We’re prone to squabbles, laziness, self-interest, and stubbornness.

This explains our attraction to machines. They don’t argue, talk back, or show up late.

In order for the industrial complex to function, something had to be done about the inherent lack of predictability and consistency humans brought to the workplace. Efficiency, productivity, and consistency necessitated that humans behave more like machines.

Enter Frederick Winslow Taylor, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1856, who even as a child gained a reputation for his meticulous nature. He organized his books and clothing with extraordinary attention to detail, and grew distressed if anything was out of order.

Taylor began his career as a laborer at Midvale Steel in Philadelphia, eventually rising to chief engineer. It was there that he started experimenting with what would become scientific management.

Taylor noticed that workers on the shop floor had varying levels of productivity, even when doing the same task. To prove there was a better way, he took a stopwatch and clipboard and timed every motion a worker made while performing simple tasks—such as moving iron bars, turning a lathe, or lifting parts.

One well-known example of his early work involved the task of cutting metal with a lathe. In order to increase consistency and efficiency, Taylor would:

• Observe the motions involved in placing the metal, setting the tool, and performing the cut.

• Time each motion with a stopwatch.

• Record variations and eliminate unnecessary movements.

• Determine the fastest, most efficient method.

• Train workers to follow that standardized sequence exactly.

Taylor would later describe how this allowed Midvale Steel to double or even triple output without exhausting workers—provided they followed the precise instructions derived from his measurements.

In his 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor writes:

“In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

Numerous companies borrowed from his principles to transform efficiency and production. But Taylor’s practices incurred a hefty cost—intended or not. His philosophy of management reinforced the notion that humans can and should behave more like machines.

Seminars as Assembly Lines

A host of factors converged toward the middle of the 20th century to revolutionize the American economy. An economy based on knowledge, innovation, and service replaced demands for standardization, efficiency, and manual labor from the industrial era. The new economy required adaptability, technology, and human creativity.

The industrial economy needed humans to behave more like machines. Companies now need humans to behave more like humans. Companies used to seek employees to fulfill the tasks listed on a job description. Increasingly, they want employees with catalytic competence.

Employers exchanged Taylor’s focus on technical skills and principles and began to focus on catalytic competencies. But while they updated their leadership development content, they failed to update the process by which they sought to cultivate these skills.

This fatal flaw resulted in programs, conferences, workshops, and seminars predicated on the faulty notion that leaders would develop catalytic competence through repeated exposure to information.

As an example, I was once asked to sit through a six-session seminar as an observer. Participants met weekly for an entire day. Each day included a series of modules that focused on topics like effective listening and communication, and how to build trust. Sessions blended slide presentations, small group discussion, and hands-on exercises designed to illustrate the principles contained in the seminar binder. At the close of the final session, participants shared their takeaways with the group and received a certificate of completion.

This approach to leadership development is so familiar, so ubiquitous, that we hardly question it. The fact that it shows little impact on the participants doesn’t seem to matter. They learned the principles. They did the activities and the homework. They must be better leaders, right?

Wrong.

It’s a leadership development assembly line. We even talk about training as something we go “through,” like cars passing through various stages of assembly. Proof of completion serves as evidence that we’ve completed the process and presumably developed a particular catalytic competence.

Leaders do not develop the skills required for today’s marketplace through the same means that they developed skills for the industrial economy a century ago. Frederick Winslow Taylor improved efficiency by teaching employees discrete steps they could replicate throughout the manufacturing process. This worked because the training process treated employees like they were a product on an assembly line. Instead of assembling vehicles, employees acquired skills in modules and received certifications for demonstrating competence. The industrial approach works with finite, measurable skills because they provide immediate feedback. A trainer can confirm an employee’s competence in a particular skill through observation—either they adhere to each step in the process or they don’t.

But how do you improve a leader’s ability to build trust, make good decisions, or improve their listening and communication skills?

You can’t time empathy with a stopwatch.

The reason leadership development continues to fail to develop leaders is that it retains the belief that leaders can develop concrete and catalytic skills through the same means. It swapped out the training content without updating the process. The belief that a leader can go through a seminar, attend a conference, or complete a course reflects our assembly line mentality.

Using my example above, the leaders traveled through the six-week seminar like vehicles along an assembly line. They learned about soft skills each week and had the opportunity to practice them with one another. Those with perfect attendance received their certificate of completion.

The problem, of course, is that the way we develop catalytic skills shares little in common with how we learn concrete skills.

Adapting our approach to developing leaders is not a matter of swapping out content. We have to change the process.

How to Actually Develop Catalytic Competence

So how did that teenage Disney employee develop his catalytic competence? And what can we learn and apply to the way we develop leaders in the new economy?

1. Use Mentoring, Not Modules

Pair every new employee with someone who already demonstrates the behaviors you most want to multiply. This isn’t classroom training. It’s apprenticeship in real work. Follow the See-Do-Coach model:

See: Have an employee observe model behavior as demonstrated by experienced colleagues in actual work situations.

Do: Have them practice the behavior in real situations with mentor support.

Coach: Provide specific, immediate feedback while the learning is fresh.

Reinforce behaviors through recognition and stories

When someone demonstrates the behaviors you want, celebrate them publicly—and turn recognized behaviors into stories that spread throughout the organization.

2. Make Leaders into Coaches

This study from Gallup highlights the need for bosses to function as coaches. It goes on to highlight the following qualities of exceptional coaches:

• Focus on individual and team engagement: Coaches provide employees what they need to succeed, leveraging the 12 elements of engagement to drive motivation and performance.

• Leverage individual talents and strengths: Coaches understand and deploy each employee’s unique strengths

• Set clear expectations and offer developmental feedback: Coaches establish clear goals and deliver feedback that enhances strengths and team effectiveness—a contrast to bosses who typically focus on correcting mistakes.

3. Turn Your Abstract Values into Specific Behaviors

Multiply the behaviors that matter most. Whatever your organization claims to value—innovation, collaboration, quality, integrity—define exactly what those look like in daily practice. This essential step translates abstract ideas into visible expressions.

Why This Approach Works

1. Clarity: Everyone knows exactly what “good” looks like.

2. Repetition: Behaviors become habit through on-the-job practice, not just concepts employees memorize for a test.

3. Social norming: New hires see the culture in action from day one.

4. Continuous development: Formal mentoring and informal peer guidance preserve high standards over time.

The Real Competitive Advantage

While your competitors send their people to leadership seminars, you create leaders through a fundamentally different process. You understand that catalytic competence can’t be downloaded—it has to be developed through relationships, practice, and continuous reinforcement in real situations.

The assembly line was a brilliant solution for industrial challenges. But humans aren’t products. We’re complex beings whose greatest capabilities emerge through authentically human development processes.

The Disney employee that collected my garbage would have been seen by Taylor as a clear demonstration of inefficiency. I saw his behavior as an act of human kindness.

The companies that prioritize human development won’t just develop better leaders—they’ll humanize their organizations. And in an increasingly automated world, being more human isn’t just an advantage.

It’s essential.

I've been working with leaders since 2006 to help them develop themselves and others. Looking back, I can identify three phases in my evolution, each built around a central offering to my clients:

• Phase 1: Presentations

As "The Sage on the Stage," I delivered keynote presentations and facilitated workshops.

• Phase 2: Products

I offered leadership tools and processes as products that comprise a shared leadership language.

• Phase 3: Partnership

I form a trusted partnership with clients in which we co-create custom solutions to their unique challenges.

The majority of companies rely on the offerings I included in my first two phases of work—presentations and products. For reasons that we will explore throughout this series, very few companies develop bespoke leadership development approaches.

Phase 1: Presentations

A global apparel brand brought me in to speak to 500 of their top brand leaders. At the close of my keynote a woman approached the stage and raved about my presentation. She said it couldn't have been more helpful or timely.

"My team and I have been stuck for months," she said. "Your presentation is exactly what we need to get unstuck. I can't wait to share it with my team."

She went on to pay me high praise for my delivery and presentation style. I was grateful for her feedback and to hear she got so much out of my talk. But as she turned to leave something didn't feel right.

In the face of so much positive feedback, what could possibly be wrong?

I had just delivered a keynote presentation that informed and inspired the audience. I provided practical tips and techniques they could apply to their work. I did my job as a presenter and I did it well.

Still, something didn't sit well with me. As I traveled home, I kept replaying the interaction with the leader in my mind to try and figure out the source of my concern.

I began to imagine her making her way to the back of the auditorium. I pictured her looking at her phone and seeing the dozens of unanswered texts, emails, and messages that accumulated during my talk. She was probably inundated by demands from people vying for her attention.

You get the idea. This is how real life plays out for all of us.

My heart sank as this scenario unfolded in my mind. I realized that despite her best intentions and mine, the insights she gained from my talk are no match for the other professional and personal demands competing for her attention.

I realized that the nagging feeling I experienced after my talk was the realization that I was perpetuating a flawed and outdated model of leadership. I was contributing to the "Leadership Development Delusion" and its mythology. I expected that the inspiration audiences derived from my keynotes would somehow lead to longterm transformation.

I had fallen victim to the magical thinking that infects so many leadership development approaches.

There had to be a better way.

Phase 2: Products

A turning point came when I was sitting across from a Vice President of Product for a global retailer. I had been coaching her for about six months when she said, "Andrew, I'm really struggling with my team, and I don't know what to do," she said, "We don't communicate well and several of them don't get along with each other."

I understood her struggle. My masters program trained me how to assess people systems and dynamics. The problem was that I lacked the tools and frameworks I needed to address the issue in a corporate context.

I couldn't help her.

This realization set me in search of solutions that I could use to address these kinds of leadership challenges. In the months and years that followed I familiarized myself with a host of leadership tools and sought out relevant certifications. The companies I worked with experienced immediate improvements in leadership, culture, and productivity.

One of the first teams I worked with in this second phase of my career was experiencing interpersonal conflict that hampered their ability to perform. The CEO was thrilled when I was able to resolve the conflict and get the team back on track in less than six weeks. Another company I worked with early on experienced a fourfold increase in productivity as a direct result of our work together.

This phase of my work solved for some of the difficulties I experienced as a presenter. Instead of appearing as "The Sage on the Stage," I was able to work with companies for longer periods of time. I got to walk alongside them and help familiarize them with my products, tools, and processes.

But as this phase of my career unfolded, several concerns began to mount—not about the outcomes for my clients, but the means by which I was reaching them.

Challenges in business, especially those related to people, include layers of complexity. In most cases, a simple solution won't do. Yet that's what I found myself offering—simplistic solutions to complex problems. I found myself knowing the solution without fully understanding the problem. I had come to believe that since I have a hammer, everything must be a nail.

Offering products and solutions to companies solved the dilemma I faced as a presenter. I could now bring verifiable change to company leaders and their culture. Now I encountered another challenge: how to craft an approach that addresses the complex issues leaders face rather than view their problems through my solutions.

Phase 3: Partnership

Presentations and products—the first two phases of my work—fail companies for a host of reasons. One reason is that they encourage passivity on the part of the client. The consultant fulfills the role of the SME—the leadership subject matter expert. This typically involves workshops and small groups where the role of the client is to listen and learn. As a presenter, and then as a purveyor of products, my role was to share my expertise. The client's role was to absorb it. That's the agreement.

No small amount of magical thinking perpetuates this tacit agreement between client and consultant. It presupposes that my expertise will somehow transfer to clients like an undetectable contagion.

A turning point in my thinking took place when I kicked off a company-wide leadership process with a group of several dozen key leaders. Judging from the body language in the audience, this group seemed to have more detractors than usual. Many had their arms crossed, or avoided eye contact. One person had his back turned to me.

Rather than proceed with my kickoff keynote as planned, I changed directions. I asked them to break into pairs and answer a single question:

If you could wave a magic wand and improve one issue with the company leadership and culture, what would it be?

The dynamic in the audience shifted immediately. The room quickly filled with energetic discussions. After ten minutes I brought them back together and asked them to share their answers. Things like miscommunication, lack of trust, conflicts, inefficiencies, burnout and turnover surfaced from their discussions.

As the list of issues unfolded, I wrote them on the whiteboard up front. I noticed a change had taken place in the audience. Most were leaning forward in their seats. Not a single person's arms were crossed. Even the person with his back to me had turned to face forward and join the discussion.

What happened?

The great American novelist, John Steinbeck said that "If a story is not about the hearer they will not listen." In other words, the role of an author is to craft a story in such a way that the reader can see themself in it.

This explains the visible shift I observed in the audience. I made the process about them, not me. After all, they're the experts on themselves and their company. I'm the expert on my subject matter. Together we recast the implicit agreement between consultant and client as co-creators.

This experience proved invaluable in my evolution to the third phase of my career. From that point forward I began engagements by clarifying the needs of each client. Then we begin to build and refine a plan that we tailor to their unique challenges. The result is a custom program that our clients own and sustain.

I’ll share more details about this approach in future articles.

Where Does Your Company Stand?

My journey through these three phases taught me that most companies are still operating with outdated approaches to leadership development. In fact, only about half of all companies incorporate any form of leadership development at all. Of those that do, the vast majority are stuck in Phase 1 or Phase 2—relying on presentations or off-the-shelf products rather than developing customized solutions.

Here's how to assess where your company stands. Think about your current efforts to develop yourself and others and whether you agree or disagree with the following statements:

1. We customized our leadership development approach to the unique challenges we face as a company.

2. We own and can sustain our approach to developing leaders for years to come.

3. We seek to develop self awareness and emotional intelligence as opposed to "quick fixes".

If you answered "yes" to each of these questions, you're operating in Phase 3—true partnership. You're also ahead of the curve. Most companies are still trapped in the earlier phases of my evolution.

The Choice Before You

This brings me to a hard truth: companies that dabble in Phase 1 presentations or chase the latest Phase 2 trends may be better off directing their budgets elsewhere. Sometimes doing nothing is better than perpetuating the "Leadership Development Delusion."

Rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars on a keynote speaker or "copy and paste" leadership development program, consider less expensive alternatives. You may find that's a better use of your valuable leadership development dollars.

But if you're serious about developing leaders, you need a Phase 3 approach—one that provides the kind of returns you expect from any investment. For every dollar you spend on developing leaders, you can expect a return in the form of increased engagement, retention, and productivity.

Anything short of this amounts to a net loss. Not an investment.

"A problem well stated is a problem half solved." -Charles Kettering

I’ve deliberately chosen to begin this series by defining the problem with leadership development. This essay introduces the 4 Pillars of the Leadership Delusion: information, insights, inspiration, and intentions, and the belief that these will lead to transformation. These pillars rest on a flawed assumption.

In reality, insights lead to intentions and intentions fade, and the leader eventually defaults to their previous state. As a result, leaders routinely seek out leadership development in search of lasting transformation but experience short-term inspiration instead. This highlights the need for approaches I will explore later in this series.

What is Leadership Development?

Let’s start with some definitions. The term, “leadership” implies the act of guiding a group of people in a particular direction. The leader charts the course for a particular destination. Leadership describes how that leader guides people in that direction.

“Development” denotes growth, expansion, and maturation. A leader that experiences growth demonstrates attributes that they did not previously possess. For example, if a leader learns to effectively calibrate their leadership to the unique personalities of the people they lead, we say that this person has developed in this particular area of leadership.

These two terms convene as “leadership development” to describe the experiences, resources, efforts, processes, and strategies related to helping leaders grow and mature.

When companies invest in leadership development, they do so with the assumption that their investment will yield a return. Much like investments in a portfolio, they believe growth among their leaders will produce far more value to the company than their original investment. No company would deliberately invest in leadership development in hopes that it produces little or no noticeable effects. Yet in most cases that’s exactly what happens—leadership development deludes leaders instead of developing them.

Why Leadership Development Fails to Develop Leaders—2 Reasons

The ineffectiveness and irrelevance that plagues leadership development stems from two primary reasons. The first is that leaders and the Leadership Development industry conflate inspiration with transformation. I focus on this theme in the essay that follows.

The second reason leadership development fails to develop leaders is that the theory and processes by which leadership development seeks to cultivate change draw from 20th Century management practices. I trust this connection will be more apparent when we delve into that section of this series.

A Tale of Delusion

I was recently having lunch with a friend when he began telling me about a leadership conference he attended in Chicago. The list of keynote speakers included bestselling authors and renowned leadership experts. He sat in the front row each day of the conference, and returned home with signed books, training manuals, and pages of notes.

“It changed my life,” he said, “I wish you could have been there. You would have loved it!”

The conference had clearly impacted my friend. I didn’t question his sincerity. But I was curious about how the conference had affected his leadership.

“How have you implemented your takeaways from the conference?”, I asked.

“Oh man, I’ve been slammed since I got back and haven’t had the time to do much with it yet,” he said. “But I have the training manuals on the bookshelf in my office and am planning to share them with my team soon.”

“When was the conference?”, I asked.

“About three months ago.”

I couldn’t help feeling dubious that my friend would find the time to share his insights from the conference with the team, but not because his intentions weren’t sincere. Like most leaders, it’s a function of time. If he hadn’t found time in the previous three months to implement his learnings from the conference, he probably wouldn’t ever get to it with so many other demands competing for his attention.

I’ve been part of dozens of conversations like this over the course of my career and notice they tend to follow a similar pattern:

1. A leader attends a leadership conference, workshop, or seminar series in order to develop themselves.

2. They gain valuable insights and takeaways that can impact their leadership.

3. Despite their best intentions, they eventually revert to old leadership behaviors and mindsets.

They may have gained other benefits, but development wasn’t one of them. This raises the question: Why do we refer to these experiences as leadership development if they fail to deliver leaders?

The 4 Pillars of the Leadership Development Mythology

A leadership development mythology makes the leadership development delusion possible for people like my friend. It’s rooted in the faulty notion that information will lead to transformation. It maintains that the difference between where a leader is now in their leadership and where they could be is a lack of having the proper knowledge or tools. It assumes that if the leader knows better, the leader will do better.

Four pillars support the Leadership Development mythology:

• Information: A leader learns a new piece of information, typically from a leadership speaker, video, podcast, or book.

• Insight: This information produces a fresh perspective for the leader.

• Inspiration: The insight fills the leader with inspiration.

• Intention: The leader finds themselves motivated to do and be a better leader and person.

This sequence mirrors the dopamine cycle. The process begins when a stimulus triggers the release of dopamine from neurons. As the dopamine binds to receptors we experience a change of mood and motivation. Through re-uptake, degradation, and recycling the dopamine eventually loses its potency which results in a normalized mood and motivation.

Leadership Development follows a similar pattern. Once the insights, inspiration, and intentions fade, the leader returns to a state of sobriety. My friend, like so many leaders, conflated the inspiration he experienced at the conference with transformation. Even though the conference made him feel like a better leader, he returned the same leader he was before the conference.

The Delusion Debt

Leadership development ought to perform like an investment—for every dollar a company pays into it, they should expect a return. In reality leadership development behaves more like an expense—instead of adding value and profit to companies, it increases their debt.

With my friend’s help, I calculated a conservative cost estimate of about $15,000 for him to go to the conference in Chicago. We included direct costs (conference fees, lodging, airfare, per diem, etc.) as well as indirect costs from losses in productivity for him and his team while he was away.

This is one small example of how the Leadership Delusion increases company debt. American companies spend more than $150 billion annually on education and training, according to a Harvard Business School publication entitled, “The Great Training Robbery”. These valuable dollars go toward programs, consultants, coaches, digital platforms, and live learning opportunities like the conference my friend attended.

The paper also includes a study in which 10% of the leaders surveyed say their leadership development programs were effective.

Imagine how you would react if you ordered 100 computers and only 10 of the computers worked. This is exactly what’s happening with leadership development—according to the study, for every 100 programs that companies implement, only 10 of them produce results.

Companies that recognize the mythology that cloaks the Leadership Development Delusion dispel the leadership development mythology. Instead of adding to their debt by funding momentary inspiration, they’ll experience valuable returns on their investment in the form of healthier, more effective leaders.

Concluding the Delusion

The purpose of this series is to help leaders and companies effectively develop their leaders. I’m going to highlight specific steps you can take to experience genuine transformation for themselves and the people they lead so that they can bring the Leadership Delusion to its conclusion.

Spells are best unwound by traveling back to the source. Only then will they lose their grip. I’ll begin with a brief review of how we got here. Deepening our understanding of the delusion’s conception will help you recognize it and avoid replicating it in the future.

In the next essay I will share a personal story of how I went from someone that contributed to the delusion to someone who strives to dispel and replace it with approaches that bring lasting transformation to the companies I partner with.