The Challenge of Leadership Development
Many leadership interventions fail to engage business leaders in their design, making them feel like academic exercises rather than opportunities for real organizational and personal growth. Research shows that leaders learn best from experiences rooted in their daily work that have direct job applicability. However, few programs are tracked to determine their actual impact on performance.
This case study outlines a comprehensive process for designing, delivering, and evaluating a global leadership development initiative used in GE Capital's financial services business. The process is proven to work across diverse cultures and business types.
Making the Business Case
As GE Capital experienced tremendous global expansion in the mid-to-late 1990s, there was a risk of diluting the company's strong culture and leadership talent. Since leadership is critical for modeling and reinforcing culture, the business focused on developing its new and emerging leaders in a cost-effective, high-impact way.
Stage 1: Getting Started with Discovery
The initial impulse is often to consult internal training experts, but this can perpetuate existing myths and prevent new thinking. The most valuable insights come from the leaders themselves.
Leader Interviews
An extensive interview process was conducted with business leaders and potential program participants. The open-ended questions focused on future business challenges and leadership requirements, rather than asking for a simple list of skills.
Key questions included:
- What are the biggest challenges facing the business?
- If you had one message to future leaders, what would it be?
- What was your greatest defining moment that taught you about leadership?
- What excites you most about your current role?
This approach uncovered a consensus on business challenges and revealed that the leaders had strong, teachable points of view, making them ideal faculty members for the future program. It generated significant energy and buy-in for the initiative.
Lesson 1: Engage Leaders Early. This foundational step creates momentum and ensures the program is grounded in real business needs.
Building the Framework
With macro business issues defined, the next step was to define the specific leadership characteristics and behaviors required. Using GE's "Workoutä" problem-solving technique, teams of business leaders collaborated to drill down from macro characteristics into specific behavioral terms.
This process produced a GE-specific leadership development framework that was validated and endorsed by all business leaders. While it aligned closely with established leadership research, its power came from being developed and owned internally.
Lesson 2: Build Your Own Framework. An internally developed framework has more weight and ownership than a generic model presented by HR or an outside consultant.
Stage 2: Building the Operating Philosophy
A contemporary view holds that leadership operates at three levels: personal behavior, team interaction, and organizational stewardship. This "Three Lenses of Leadership" model became the organizing principle for the program design, ensuring a focus on:
- The Leader: Personal values and behaviors.
- The Follower: Interactions and modeling values.
- The Organization: Building a healthy, sustainable system.
This philosophy was integrated with several key concepts:
- Action Learning: Participants take action, reflect, and reframe based on experience.
- Storytelling: Stories increase retention and teach leaders a powerful communication tool.
- Futuring: Focusing on a future state is more energizing than correcting past mistakes.
- Uncovering Peak Performance: Reflecting on a time you were at your best reveals your capacity for great leadership.
- Systems Thinking: Leaders need a systematic way to view the whole organization to drive alignment and change.
Lesson 3: Define Your Conceptual Framework. A clear philosophy and consistent operating assumptions provide the logical glue that holds the program together, making it more powerful and congruent for participants.
Stage 3: Program Design, Tools, and Techniques
The design was flexible enough to adapt to a changing environment but structured for reliable, high-quality results.
Pre-Work
Carefully constructed pre-work set the tone and built excitement.
- Interviews: Participants conducted interviews with their boss, peers, subordinates, and customers to set targets for their own development.
- Surveys: Participants completed a 360-degree feedback survey, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and the Leadership Impact (LI) Survey.
- Personal Calls: Each participant received a call to explain the program philosophy and set expectations.
Lesson 4: Set the Tone with Pre-Work. Individualized calls and reflective pre-work signal that the program is a unique and important experience.
The Symposium Experience
Day 1: The program opened with a powerful story illustrating value-based leadership, followed by a debrief of the pre-work interviews to establish future leadership imperatives. Participants then received their 360-feedback results, framed as what they need to work on for the future, not what they did wrong in the past. The day ended with an informal "Fireside Chat" with a senior business leader sharing their leadership journey.
Lesson 5: Use Internal Faculty and Coaches. Using business leaders as teachers and senior HR managers as coaches provides credibility and critical business context. The relationships often last long after the program.
Day 2: The focus remained on the individual, debriefing the MBTI and Leadership Impact surveys to provide multiple, correlated data points for self-improvement. The day closed with an adapted version of Marshall Goldsmith's coaching model, where peers provide practical suggestions on a single development goal.
Lesson 6: Select Instruments Carefully. Use multiple, correlated assessment tools that align with the program's core philosophy to provide strong, actionable feedback.
Days 3 & 4: The focus shifted to leader/follower relationships and organizational systems. Using a real, current business case, participants worked in teams to apply an Organization Analysis (OA) model—a systems-thinking tool for diagnosing a business and driving strategic change. A coach observed team dynamics, providing real-time feedback on behavior and process.
Lesson 7: Use Real Business Issues. Applying new models to a live, pressing business problem makes the learning more effective and surfaces team behaviors in a powerful way.
Day 5: Participants finalized personal development plans and their recommendations on the business case. The program concluded with a report-out and dialogue with a top executive, such as the President or CEO, ensuring the teams' work had high-level visibility.
Follow-Up and Measurable Results
To ensure lasting impact, the program included significant follow-up.
- Impact Surveys: Participants were surveyed on actions taken at the individual, team, and organizational levels.
- "Best Practice" Forums: Data on additional support needs led to one-day follow-up sessions with experts on specific topics.
- Mini-360 Follow-Up: Three and six months post-program, a mini-360 was conducted focusing on each participant's specific development goal.
Results showed that in 95% of cases, participants had demonstrably improved on the job as viewed by their colleagues. The program consistently earned top ratings, and many of the recommendations from the case studies were implemented with great success.
Lesson 8: Follow-Up is Key. Without follow-up, an intervention cannot document real business impact beyond initial positive reactions.
Final Observations
Powerful leadership interventions require thorough upfront planning grounded in the business challenges. The goal is not just skill-building but helping leaders connect with their core values and act consistently with them. Finally, partnering directly with business leaders in the design, delivery, and follow-up is the ultimate key to success.