ROI for leadership development

One of the things I often get asked is “how do you measure the effectiveness of leadership development?” Quite frankly, the question bamboozles me, but I think I may have come up with something. I do need to do a bit more work around it, but this blog is kind of my thinking out loud about how to go about this.  Thanks Rustica Lamb for prompting the inspiration!

To set the scene, I am not a fan of using engagement scores, business productivity, quality, or cost as a way to measure leadership effectiveness. I think engagement scores have something to add but can someone show me the objective research around engagement scores and business performance? Like ‘evidence’ presented around lean manufacturing, information on ‘engagement’ is more often than not coming from consultants. I’d love to be set straight here. Furthermore, from the research I’ve done, teams can have a really bad leader and still show significant improvements to quality, speed and cost. Of course, this is what businesses want. But I question whether this can be sustained long-term.

So how do you measure the effectiveness of a leadership development course? Particularly when that course involves participants spread across different businesses? I think it’s helpful to look at changes to individual performance, or perceptions thereof.

Individual performance is very much contingent on the abilty (A), opportunity (O), and motivation (M) to perform. This has been evidenced in very practical research, including Boxall and Purcell (2011) and Sterling and Boxall (forthcoming). (I just had to cite myself there, still buzzing about being published in the Human Resource Management Journal soon!) The AMO model is one that applies to managers, leaders and the people they lead/manage. Indeed, what the research shows is that management (or leadership) has a direct impact on these variables. Managers/leaders need to have the ability, motivation and opportunity to perform to enable the people they manage/lead to have the same.

Therefore, when measuring the effectiveness of a leadership development program it makes sense to examine changes to leadership performance in terms of the AMO model.

I think the leadership development course I have designed is very much concerned with these principles. It is enabling leadership ability (A) through greater awareness of personal leadership style, it provides the motivation (M) to perform by identifying individual values, motivation and purpose, and it provides the opportunity (O) by enabling support networks and integration between work and life. Changes to these variables should be manifested in the work environment. But how do I measure that?

As part of the research paper I am putting together for the HRINZ research forum on the 15th November is a framework for successful implementation of HR practices using the AMO model.  I need to take this framework and ask “how could you measure that?” What I’m thinking is a questionnaire around perceptions of ability, motivation and opportunity to perform pre and post the leadership development course.

Do you think this will help address ROI for leadership development?

References

Boxall, P. and Purcell, J. (2011). Strategy and Human Resource Management (3rd edn), Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sterling, A., Boxall, P. (forthcoming). Lean production, employee learning and workplace outcomes: a case analysis through the AMO framework. Human Resources Management Journal. – yeah I’m referencing it!

... and you can register for the HRINZ forum here.

Here we go!

One of the big things about doing a course through social media is realizing how much I don’t know. I don’t know if I should admit this, but I am not an expert in social media. In a lot of ways that’s a good thing. Firstly, because if anyone wants to emulate this course they don’t need to be an expert to do it. Secondly, I am learning a lot!

This past week, I have learnt how to use Wordpress. My blog site looks like a proper little website. I’ve learnt how to do little bits of code to put in pictures – woo pictures! I learnt how to use Jing, which is a screen capture tool that you can do voiceovers. After doing the video about 10 times I've sick of the sound of my own voice. But, I did get stuck when it came to convert the SWF file (don't ask me what SWF means) that Jing produced into something that could be uploaded to YouTube. Gareth (husband for those of you who don’t know) had to come to my rescue here.

Another benefit is that I’m like a sponge for learning and leadership information at the moment. I’ve seen some cool presentations through IGNITE where primary and high school teachers do short sharp presentations about what they are doing professionally and what they are passionate about. I’ve learnt a lot from them about how to facilitate collaborative learning (it also makes me wonder how far corporate organizations are lagging behind the education sector in how learning is delivered). I also went to a cool workshop through Blacksmith on what NZ Post is doing with leadership development. I really liked how they used people who weren’t necessarily facilitators to facilitate the programme. I also liked the ideas about sharing stories and authenticity as leaders.

I have inspiration from a lot of corners at the moment and it gives me faith in what I am doing. Now to see if it works J

The beginning of an adventure

It’s been a bit quiet in my blog lately but that doesn’t mean I have not been busy beavering away. I now have 11 participants in my social media based leadership development course! It’s a bit scary actually. 11 people with expectations of the awesomeness I am going to create – I cannot let them down.

People have also been really interested in what I am doing which is really cool. That is why I am going to dedicate my personal blog to the process of designing and delivering a leadership development course done entirely through social media.

So over the next 9 weeks or so I am going to write about my reflections on going through this process. Hopefully, those of you who read this will learn something. Here are some of my reflections so far.

Firstly, the course launches on the 24^th September and I’d like to clone myself right now. It’s more because of a ‘timing’ rather than a ‘time’ issue though. What I mean is that my head is just spewing out these cool ideas, all at the same time and I’d really like to have another me sitting next to me, so she can work on one page and I can work on the other – that way we won’t miss any of the cool ideas.

Secondly, it’s quite a fine line between delivering content and facilitating learning. It’s very tempting to dump down all this information for me to deliver to participants – mostly so I can feel like I am giving them value. Providing value through content is so much easier to do then standing back and saying “I’m not going to tell you anything, you have to find it out for yourself”. But this is what the course is built upon. It’s not about telling people about their leadership – it is facilitating the discovery of their leadership. You cannot deliver content to do this. The whole point of using social media as a learning tool is for people to discover the content for themselves.

That’s a hard one for me to get my head around. So right now I am working through how much information to NOT provide. It’s bit risky and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about it. It’s hard to measure the value of this course when I’m very much putting it in the hands of the participants and not holding on to it myself.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the role of social media as a learning tool. Would you feel comfortable facilitating something intangible?