Leadership development - Blair McPherson

This may be considered heresy but I have found the most effective leadership programmes to be within a departmen/ directoratet. My experience of corporate programmes across the whole organisation was disappointing. Commitment levels vary between departments,the convoy only proceeds at the pace of the slowest ship,a lot of energy seems to be sucked into administering the programme and the enthusiasm for it can not be maintained long enough to get a critical mass of manager /leaders through the programme in order to get the desired cultural change. Programmes based on place bring together people from different organisations have been even more frustrating suffering many of the same problems and generating very little change from a high investment of time, energy and money. This is not to say that such programme have not improved working relations and strategic planing they do but usually as a result of one or two individuals"getting on" finding some like minded person and building on the relationship. In a large department/ directorate with 500 managers I saw real change take place in how things were don once the top 50 managers had gone through the programme and the programme was rolled out to all managers. The critical mass was some where around 200 managers which was 3 years into the programme. Turn over of managers is a really challenge particularly amongst the top 50. There is a detailed case study in Equipping managers for an uncertain future published by www.russellhouse.co.uk