“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” a quote frequently attributed to Peter Drucker, sums up the recent fervor to focus on organizational culture. Yet, with all the talk, why do we see little action—few organizations that actually change their culture? Culture catches us because we typically don’t see it as something we can change, tweak, or improve. Instead, we show up everyday saying things like, “This place is crazy;” or “This is so frustrating. I wish we could do things differently.” When we talk about our workplace in this way, we’re not in control, our culture is. It is our culture that drives our environment and the way we do our work instead of us driving and shaping our culture. We become resigned to it as if it were some unruly, entity outside of us. While everyone in the workplace contributes to the culture on a daily basis, leaders have the most leverage to influence and change it. To do so, they must first understand what culture is. It’s the “way we do things around here.” It’s the unwritten rules of their workplace that shape the environment and behaviors. Then, leaders must be able to fully see all aspects of their organizational culture—are we, to name a few, risk-averse or risk-taking?; process-obsessed or process-indifferent?; hierarchical or egalitarian? Then comes the key question. Once leaders can fully describe their organizational culture with detail, they need to ask themselves: “Is this culture the culture that will best enable us to reach or organizational vision, mission, and strategy.” 99% of the time, the answer is no. That’s when leaders need to take charge and figure out what that ideal culture is. They need to drive and create the effective culture they need versus being driven by the ineffective culture they have.

Here’s my revised and updated definition of insanity for our industry: doing the same Leadership Development we’ve always done and expecting different results. Today’s Leadership Development needs to prepare leaders for today’s workplace, not for the workplace of the 20th Century. Seems obvious, right? Yet, how many of organizations offer up programs that are either in the same format or teach the same old leadership frameworks—ones that were created back in the 1950s? Too many. The real problem with this is that we can’t understand why we aren’t getting different results. To be effective, we know that both the how and the what of Leadership Development today need to be different.

First, the how needs to move outside of the classroom and into the daily lives of leaders. Call that “Action Learning,” “Applied Learning,” or “On-the-Job Training;” at deepSEE, we call it common sense. A recent article, "Real Leadership" in Twin Cities Business (May 2011) lays out the advantages of this approach and the best practices of the organizations that are using it. Essentially, today’s Leadership Development that makes a difference goes beyond training and includes real-life organizational projects, coaching, mentoring and targeted assessments and development plans. It allows leaders to practice and apply what they learn in the classroom for real results in the organization.

But it’s not just the how that needs to change. We also need to take a look at what we’re teaching today’s leaders. There’s no doubt that the current workplace is different than the workplace of even just a decade ago. It’s faster-paced, diverse, change-oriented and, thanks to our current economy, also more efficient. To lead in this dynamic environment calls for new and more refined competencies such as Change Management, Cultural Competence or Leadership of Remote Teams, to name a few. These competencies provide leaders with new lenses to SEE the burgeoning challenges of their workplace from a different perspective and then adapt to those challenges with more effective approaches that better meet the needs of their team and organization as a whole.

So, here’s to bringing sanity to our Leaders with Development that meets their realities and makes a difference in their organizations.