No one cares about your framework – they care about leadership problems
This article was the topic of a recent live event, hosted by the author. Watch and listen, here. A few years ago for Christmas, my dad gave me a beautiful antique atlas. It’s oversized and hardbound. This is the kind of book that covers the whole coffee table when it’s open yet still requires a magnifying glass to read the names of towns. My dad gave it to us “because you all travel so much.”…
Leadership frameworks, while important, often fail to engage learners because they're too robust and not packaged in a practical way. My dad gave me an antique atlas for Christmas, intending it would help us travel, but it sits on a shelf, unopened and unreadable by my young children. Similarly, leadership frameworks provide valuable information but lack the ability to help leaders navigate immediate problems.
As the leader of Big Think+'s Partner Success & Services team, I've observed that these frameworks lack the power to move learners to action. They focus on describing behaviors, grouping skills, and charting cultural growth over time, but they don't help leaders immediately solve pressing issues. To create effective leadership programs, we need to shift from using frameworks to focusing on real leadership problems.
Instead of titling programs with generic competencies, we should use specific problem statements that resonate with leaders. For example, instead of "Competency 1: Delegation & Empowerment for Managers," we could use "Problem 1: I'm drowning in work that only I know how to do." This approach focuses on what leaders are experiencing in their day-to-day lives, making the learning more relevant and engaging.
By connecting problems to frameworks through measurement, we can communicate behavior outcomes in the language of our framework, making the program more effective.
Written by urgent.news from Big Think's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
