I’ve had a beef with leadership development programs ever since I knew what they were.

I’m not sure what triggered this. It could be the fact that back in high school, when I was a senior, we had a ‘leadership day’ that was held at a venue that wasn’t our usual school campus. Exciting, right? The only thing I remember from that day is that the facilitator at one point told us to look at our peers to the left and to the right of us. He then said, “One out of every five of you will be dead by 30 years of age”. I think he thought it was a galvanising thing to say, to push home the carpe diem message. For me, it has fused leadership and mortality ever since.

Fast forward a few decades.

I have been in a fair number of leadership workshops, convened some of them myself, and been a participant in a year-long gender diversity in leadership program. I wouldn’t count any of these experiences as particularly illuminating or motivating for me. If anything, they made me feel more alienated from the idea of leadership and affirmed my evasion of institutional leadership roles. In some ways, I’m a weird fish because I was the convenor of a research network from my ECR (Early Career Researcher) days, which was a leadership role within the field. I’ve written before about my ambivalent relationship with ambition, and I viewed aspiring to (institutional) leadership as an example of this. For me, it was one of those situations where, if someone’s desperately wanting to be seen as a leader, they may not be the best leader.

Wondering whether it was just my jaundiced view or a more widely shared perspective, I crowdsourced from the Research Whisperer community and surveyed their experiences of leadership development programs.

The twenty responses were more enlightening about what constitutes admirable leadership than any leadership programs I had attended. They gave light and shade to the things in programs that didn’t work (and why that might be), as well as talking about the most beneficial aspects of them. All the caveats in the world about this survey. As I flagged at the beginning of the survey itself: “This is not a formal study or research project – it’s for a blogpost (or series if the response is big enough).” The responses were anonymous unless people indicated they were happy to be identified and provided their name.

The twenty responses came from academics who were located in Australia and the UK. One considered themselves an Early Career Researcher, 12 identified as Mid Career Researchers, 5 said they were Senior Researchers, and 2 did not answer. I did not have a ‘gender’ question in the survey but many of the respondents flagged that the leadership program they participated in was for women or gender diverse staff.

All respondents attended the leadership programs on a voluntary basis, with some indicating that they were ‘strongly encouraged’ by managers and more senior staff. Reasons for participating in the programs ranged from curiosity about what their university meant by ‘leadership’ to planning for promotion applications and being nominated by others.

Overall, 50% of respondents thought the program they attended was ‘Not useful’ or ‘Very not useful’. 25% thought it was ‘Useful’ or ‘Very useful’. The remainder were neutral.

In the rest of this post, I share what folks liked and disliked about the programs they participated in. I’ve summarised some of the elements and cut’n pasted some of the more substantive comments. Some of the programs discussed were single day events, others were months-long programs with multiple workshops and other elements.

What people appreciated

The elements of the leadership programs that folks said were valuable are:

• Networking and connecting aspects of the program, feeling like a cohort, meeting peers (especially of similar levels – whether that’s mid-career or senior leaders), mentoring/coaching elements, and getting to know more colleagues around the university.
  • Including this response in full because it’s fabulous:
    “I’m very sceptical about the “leadership” pseudo-psychology discourse, but more than anything I’ve found in such courses that it’s the peer discussions and engagement that are really helpful in (a) finding some terrific (female) peers around the institution who are also serious and ambitious (in good ways) (b) helping you to reflect on and articulate what is distinctive about you and your approach to collegiality, leadership and the institution/ discipline. It does help to be exposed to the meta-discourse around leadership (even though I think much of it is bogus), because some senior people believe it or at least utilise it. And knowing your enemy helps to neutralise it. Visiting senior speakers have been invaluable in internal and external programmes I’ve done – hearing about the career pathways of highly successful people has been excellent. It’s a lot like hearing a great conference paper adjacent to your area of expertise – it’s not necessarily the specific content that is illuminating, but you learn new ways of explaining and approaching shared challenges / goals / aspirations, and learn to project yourself into that leadership mindset (however sceptically).”
• Some respondents found the resources and introduction to leadership theories shared during the programs useful. The resources provided and prioritised during the programs was a contested area, though, with as many commenting that this was a badly done aspect as those who appreciated them.
• Building knowledge around effective influencing. As one respondent put it, there was value in “developing skills in strategic power analyses and action over individualistic aspects (ie tone of voice etc)”.
• Understanding what ‘leadership’ means in various contexts, especially for the institution they’re in. A couple of  respondents mentioned that this enabled them to recognise better what counts when it comes to promotions and being positively noticed. An additional element here is that academics who are new to a particular national academic context appreciated hearing about what leadership looks like in the new environment.

What people disliked  

• Easily the most disliked aspect was the corporatised nature of most leadership programs, alongside the lack of differentiation between what constitutes ‘leadership’ in a for-profit company versus a university (which, just to remind some folks, is NOT a for-profit company). This showed up as comments about the resources and discussion materials being “very North American / white /corporatist” and “lack of understanding about the researcher [or higher education] context”. Some respondents also  pointed out that the programs were not relevant to contemporary academic contexts and felt ‘out of touch’ with their university’s workload allocations and expectations.
• The exclusionary (offensive!) approach of some programs left even a cynic such as myself aghast. The missteps included not recognising that careers develop differently for different people (e.g. those with carer loads, career interruptions, precarious roles, part-time appointments). Some programs assumed that everyone in the room could have linear career progression. One respondent presented the type of ‘leadership’ role-modelled by the majority-male speakers in the program in this way: “Many extolled the virtues of exploiting PhD students and junior scholars and recommended that the best way to ‘get ahead’ was to ‘say yes to everything’, forgo work/life balance and never agree to collegial service work. There were times when attending the course made me think I needed to leave academia.” Leadership programs are a key way for an institution to communicate how it aspires to particular kinds of organisational culture. It’s where you can tell whether a university is serious about addressing issues of overwork, silo-ing, and diversity in leadership.
• Questionable facilitators/convenors can sink the program from the beginning. This element cannot be emphasised enough: just because someone holds a formal institutional leadership role doesn’t mean they are appropriate or skilled in running a leadership development program. One researcher flagged that the facilitators for their program were not known for their leadership skills, or credibility as leaders, so the entire thing was doomed from the start. All this respondent could see within the program was daunting hypocrisy. Transplanting corporate leadership consultants into the university environment (especially if you have academics/researchers in the room) is also a heinous act – reading this article by Deb Verhoeven and Ben Eltham will give you an idea why: “Nousferatu”: Are corporate consultants extracting the lifeblood from universities? (tldr: the answer’s in the title). One respondent said the facilitators for their leadership program “came off as low-rent conmen”.

In addition to specific things described above, I had included a question in the survey about whether the participants completed an evaluation of the program (or provided feedback) and whether they felt comfortable being honest in their evaluation/feedback. The majority of respondents said they completed an evaluation and/or provided feedback but, of these folks, about half said they did not feel they could be honest about what they thought. Most of the reason for this was that the program group was small and people felt they could be identified; a subset of those felt they could be identified and that any negative feedback would come back to haunt them (including not being funded by internal grant schemes).

“Leadership development programs – how can they be better? (Part 2)” will be published next week and  focuses on what respondents thought an ideal leadership program might look like, as well as my suggestions for an effective program.

Big thanks to the champions who responded to the survey and shared their thoughts and experiences so generously (and sometimes hilariously). Really wish I could have a coffee with all of you – the discussions promise to be equal parts snarky and nourishing. 

Some caveats for this post: I shared the survey about leadership development programs and invited responses in May 2022 so it has been a while since people kindly participated. Where did the four years go since then? Life! Also mea culpa for being slow. In addition, I have not undertaken any leadership development at my current institution so this is not performative white-anting.