Why Leadership Development Fails Without Clarity

This is part 1 of a 4-part conversation on the context we need for improving leadership development.

Leadership development starts with understanding what leadership actually is—but most organizations skip that step entirely. In this Relationships at Work episode, Dr. Rob Lion joins Russel Lolacher to unpack the leadership confusion so many organizations suffer from. Together, they explore why we conflate productivity with leadership, why style-based development doesn’t work, and how a lack of shared definition breaks everything downstream.

🔍 You’ll learn:

• Why clarity is foundational in leadership development
• The danger of copying poor role models
• Where post-secondary education misses the mark
• What a strong leadership identity looks like

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Transcript

Russel Lolacher: And on the show today we have Dr. Rob Lion, and here is why he is. Awesome. He's a Professor of Human Resource Development at Idaho State University. He's a principal at Black River Performance Management, which specializes in leadership and organizational development.

He's a volunteer at the Academy of Human Resource Development and contributing editor at Performance Improvement Quarterly, an academic Research Publication. Busy boy. And he is also here to talk to us about professional development. Hello, Rob.

Rob Lion: Hello, how are you this morning?

Russel Lolacher: I'm delightful. I'm not caffeinated enough, but I am excited enough about the topic. So that sort of fuels.

Rob Lion: Awesome. Let's do it.

Russel Lolacher: So today we're getting into leadership development, the context of it, digging into what it really means. But first I have to ask you the question I ask all of my guests, Rob, which is, sir, what is your best or worst employee experience?

Rob Lion: So my best and worst are the same actually.

Russel Lolacher: Oh, perfect. Okay.

Rob Lion: And so, and it was at the expense of someone else. So unfortunately it was the, at the expense of someone else. I was raised in a family that didn't do confrontation and didn't have difficult conversations, and I brought that to college. I brought that into my marriage.

I brought that all over my life, as you can imagine. As a young manager, as a first time leader, this is the best and worst experience. It's the best in the sense of, it's been the most influential experience probably of my career to change the trajectory of my behavior. It's the worst because I did something very.

It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great for the other person. So let me set it up.

I was managing a team of 10. We were approaching end of the year evaluations. Actually end of the business cycle evaluation. So we were actually doing evaluations in May and and so. You just think about it how a person enters an evaluation.

Maybe they got their evaluation in advance so they could look at it and prepare some responses. Or maybe you're handing them the evaluation. So first off, new leader, no framework, no help, no structure in terms of how do I do the successfully, right? So there's a learning lesson right there. So this woman comes in and this is May.

Let's keep this in mind. She comes in and she's expecting a satisfactory, if not outstanding evaluation. I slide it over to her and it was like excels does not meet expectation. Excels. And she said, Rob, what's this all about? This is May. I said, well, you remember back in October you didn't do this one thing correct back then, and you haven't done it correctly since.

And to her defense, she said, Rob. You never told me I didn't do it wrong. You didn't address this with me. So anyways it was the best and worst experience because I felt so bad for her as a person that I treated her this way. And it, it's one of those things that I would never have changed for myself because it just changed the trajectory of my development and my career that I needed to experience that to make the headway, to be able to do some of the things I'm doing today. So best and worst, all at the same time.

Russel Lolacher: Way to hold a grudge too. I mean like obviously you remember this bothered you and then it just needled you every single time since then.

Rob Lion: Yeah. No, I love it. And I, full disclosure with students, with clients, I'm always willing to be vulnerable, always willing to share, to help build that bridge. And I share this with every group I work with because it's... we're not good at confrontation and accountability and feedback, and so I want to normalize the fact that I started at the bottom and I've grown the skills to be where I am today.

Russel Lolacher: Fair, but you're not uncommon, Rob. I mean, how many people are in leadership positions that have no leadership training and shouldn't be in that position to begin with because they were a bum in a seat or they wanted to get paid a little bit more. So now they're in this role where they could do a lot of damage if they don't get the support... which leads us perfectly into our topic today, which is leadership development.

Rob Lion: Yes.

Russel Lolacher: It may be obvious to some to define what leadership development is, but I still find it really interesting to make sure we set the table with my guest and understanding how you would define leadership development.

Rob Lion: I'm sure that definition will have changed over the course of my career. At this point, it is, I think about it in terms as the activity and effort based on the quality of the inputs for a person to begin to build the skills, the knowledge, the wherewithal to incrementally increase their impact on others.

So ultimately, enhancing their efficacy as a leader with with respect to the people they're working with.

Russel Lolacher: Okay. How do you define that? Separating the word leadership with development? And the reason I bring this up is because we had some previous conversations and I've read a bit of your work. You talk about leadership not being simplistic. And yet we don't even define leadership, nevermind simplicity about it.

So what are we talking about when we really talk about leadership then to get to understanding development?

Rob Lion: Sure. We're talking about a range of, and I sound very textbooky, competencies, perspectives, practices, skills that relate to outward of us as well as skills internally as it relates to what that leader is and the responsibility of that leader to accomplish certain tasks. So really, as you mentioned there, alluded to there is an element of agility and being nimble which is one of the first lessons that we encounter when we talk about leadership and leadership development because you talk about it as in people don't have the prep. Very true. So where are they heading with trying to figure that out? Well, we know in most situations the leaders above them aren't all that helpful in terms of onboarding and integrating. Not to mention if they're an internal lateral position or like a promotion, giving them some cover to be successful in that position.

So what do we do as humans in terms of whether it's leadership or anything else? We look to emulate, we look to base our of our direction based off of our positive and negative experiences of the past. But often when we do that, we're looking at things as very black and white. And very similar to how people present things and say books, right?

Mainstream books, they present just do this, and that will work. And the reality is no, it's not. It's super nuanced, it's context specific, it shifts by the day. And that's one of the things that a leader has to fundamentally appreciate is how this one size fits all approach is not gonna serve anyone well.

Russel Lolacher: Love that you said that. I have had some frustrations with a reoccurring question I see online, which is what's your leadership style? And I'm like. If you have one style, you're a horrible leader, like it is a Swiss Army knife. It is adjusting, adapting to your point about the scenario or the area, the situation that you might be in.

The situational awareness, self-awareness. We'll get into all that in a little bit, but it's this confusion piece. Why that's a, it's this confusion piece where we don't seem to know what leadership actually is. And I wanna, I'm curious about your thoughts on this because to your point, leaders are looking for modeled behavior, but leaders need leaders and they're kind of being not helped a lot because at the top we are calling productivity leadership.

Rob Lion: Mm-hmm.

Russel Lolacher: And they're completely confused. Just 'cause somebody delivers a thing does not make them a leader, and yet we will call them leaders, which allows them not to have to fix those human centricity focuses that adaptability focuses unless it's about delivering a thing. So how do we work with an environment where we're focusing so much on leadership development and yet executive is defining it completely different than how we're supposed to be defining it.

Rob Lion: Well, let's start with that question in and of itself, right? That just demonstrates to us like we still see this conversation about. What's leadership versus management? We, this, how do you define your leadership style? This is where we are as a greater populace with respect to being prepared and capable to, to lead, right?

We're at a very elementary level. We value people going to school, trade, school, college, what have you, to learn their, to get their engineering degree, to get their welding certificate, all these things, but we still haven't integrated this and prioritized this as an a true factor to help enhance leadership.

And because of that, it's to each to determine what that means. And if they're not very reflective, I think they get hung up in the, what I was mentioning earlier, that retrospective of this, is what a good leader has done in my life, and this is what a poor leader has done in my life. And without any say 360 degree feedback or anything like that, they might think they're going down the good leader model path, but they might actually be exhibiting the behaviors of the poor leader model in the past. So it's a very complex thing that, what I think about, and I'm thinking about this a lot right now, is what is the person leadership identity mindset.

Mindset and how does that relate to how they actually practice leadership? And I, I. I, I would propose that if my identity is not high enough and we don't know what this number is yet, as a leader, I'm not going to live it and coach it to my people at the level we need to have as a target to break the cycle of, you got it. I believe in here's your keys, here's your name tag, and go for it. But that's where we're still at.

Russel Lolacher: I don't mean to attack you because you're a professor, but do you think some of the bigger problems happen to be in post-secondary? Because I mean, to be honest. To be honest, we've got business schools that barely think leadership is a course you should take. Meanwhile, you have to take a completely different leadership program and I can't tell you the reoccurring jokes that are, Hey, you wanna see a horrible leader?

Get somebody that got a degree or a master's in it. Like I've heard that joke more than what, a few times.

Rob Lion: Those that can't play coach, right? Like the same thing. Yeah. And we'll never get away from that. Look I think we're doing a good job in some spaces, but not all spaces. And I think, to your point, there are business schools that the amount of development that comes into the curriculum, we're not even talking about leadership.

We're talking about. This is, I refer to it capital T training, lowercase, lowercase D development in one of their HR classes. And that might be even a class or a section. And that's it. And then you think about this in terms of the continuum. Then you find some people that will teach a leadership class, but they've never, same thing as business and entrepreneurship, they'll teach these classes, but they've never owned a business. They've never started a business, they've never led an organization. And so, this is the best they're doing and they're trying their best and I respect that.

But to your point, there's a lot of truth in this that, that if we're teaching from frameworks and very strict, empirically based theoretical frameworks and saying, this is how it's going to be, our students quickly figured this out, that this guy really hasn't, or this woman hasn't been in the trenches, hasn't experienced this stuff, so they take it with a grain of salt to some extent.

And that's actually why we've had a lot of gravity in our program is that we try to spend a lot of time in the gray and, and because we're both practitioners and scholars and more so practitioners, like, that's what's at our heart we try to clarify that there's a lot of ambiguity here. But you know, just the other side of it, this is true too, we've had people that, that don't have the advanced credentials that come in and they just talk war stories based on their own personal experiences. And that doesn't help people either. And we get feedback from students that say, hey, look, this guy's just complaining about his old bosses and how to do this so and so.

So it's, it's a complicated question to answer, but to your point, there's a lot of validity for us to unpack this because A- students are spending a lot of money to get this specialization when they do come into my program, because we do offer suites of leadership pro classes. And we do need to prepare them to leave here to be at some range of level of competence to, to go out there and be ready to tackle those things that they're... it's like I'm buying a car 'cause I want to get to work. Well, if the car doesn't have tires on it. It's not that beneficial to me.

It's the same type of concept with people pursuing education.

Russel Lolacher: Fair. Fair. To your definition of leadership development, I hear you and I completely understand what you're saying, but the more I hear about and understand leadership, this show certainly helped over the last three years, is that I feel like there's less and less boundaries between leadership development, professional development, and personal development.

It all feels like the same damn thing because to be a great leader, you have to have some pretty strong foundational human skills that doesn't seem to be understood when it comes to job descriptions. And yet to be a great leader, you need that. Do you find that it's becoming more and more that way?

Rob Lion: It's a reflection of our handle of our language. So one of the things we often talk about, right on day one as we start working with groups is that, let, we have to acknowledge something that we do not hold. Even though we speak English, we do not hold a common language among us as team, as members of this organization.

So if I even take something as simple as the concept of motivation and I have 10 people on my team, I'll have 10 different definitions of that. So now blow that out against anything that wasn't taught in their craft. Engineers, they're prepared, they got their education. When they talk about these concepts that are central to their profession, they know what they mean, right?

But it's when we come outta this stuff where we're not coming through a standardized, centralized concept that the language is all over the place. And to your point, some people are intermingling all of those things. And, and what really needs to happen to build high impact, highly effective leaders is a refinement of what are those three different concepts and how do they factor into a person's development so that, so that they are becoming prepared to do the difficult things that they need to do. And some of it is professional development, some of it is self-development, some of it is leadership development, or even I'd change it to systems development. How are we leaders really at the helm of leading a group to navigate the waters ahead.

But most of the problems in the organizations I work with are systems based problems where humans are complicating it. And so the behavioral aspect comes in. So, the more we could help people understand and slow down their pace of work to understand, look, you're hired in this role as a leader, that means you have to have some sort of understanding on how to steer this boat.

And it's just not about the mission of the organization. Your leadership is a part of the mission of this job, and so it's really tough to do that when people have this mindset that, oh I'm just way too busy to take time out to do anything.

Russel Lolacher: Don't get me started on the blind spot of too busy. 'cause I'm like, are you too busy? Then you're not a leader. You're time management. You're not... because you don't have the capacity. You're literally giving an excuse as to why you can't. So thank you.