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SPOTLIGHT

EDUCATING THE NEXT GENERATION OF LEADERS

It’s time to move beyond traditional approaches to executive education.To successfully meet the challenges of today’s business world,organizations and the individuals who steer them should take more advantage of online learning resources and networking opportunities.

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THE FUTURE OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Companies spend heavily on executive education but often get a meager return on their investment.That’s because business schools and other traditional educators aren’t adept at teaching the soft skills vital for success today,people don’t always stay with the organizations that have paid for their training,and learners often can’t apply classroom lessons to their jobs.The way forward,say business professors Mihnea Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas,lies in the“personal learning cloud”—the fast-growing array of online courses,interactive platforms,and digital tools from both legacy providers and upstarts.The PLC is transforming leadership development by making it easy and affordable to get personalized,socialized,contextualized,and trackable learning experiences.

LEARN FROM PEOPLE,NOT CLASSES

To keep pace with change and avoid disruption,a business leader must constantly acquire new skills.But among the executives they know,little of this learning takes place in formal classes or programs,say Reid Hoff man,Chris Yeh,and Ben Casnocha.Instead,successful learners tap into network intelligence,seeking out one-on-one conversations with those who have faced similar challenges and can share valuable expertise.

“WE’RE GIVING OWNERSHIP OF DEVELOPMENT TO INDIVIDUALS”

A roundtable with current or former chief learning officers of Tata Business Excellence Group,American Express,and McKinsey&Company

HBR Reprint R1902B

FEATURES

INNOVATION

THE INNOVATION EQUATION

Safi Bahcall|page 080

As start-ups grow into larger,more bureaucratic companies,they’re more likely to favor safe,incremental innovation over riskier,potentially breakthrough work.

In addressing this problem,leaders often point to their culture as the key to driving radical innovation.But structural levers can also help growing companies avoid the shift from truly innovative to incrementally so.These include the extent to which compensation reflects the outcome of projects as opposed to rank within the organization;ratio of project-skill fit(how suited employees are to the tasks they’re assigned)to return on politics(the benefits accrued by networking and politicking);management span(the number of direct reports per leader);and salary step-up(the financial benefits of rising in the hierarchy).

HBR Reprint R1902E

FEATURES

LEADING TEAMS

THE RIGHT WAY TO LEAD DESIGN THINKING

Christian Bason and Robert D.Austin

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The authors studied almost two dozen major design-thinking projects within large private-and public-sector organizations in five countries and found that effective leadership is critical to their success.They focused not on how individual design teams did their work but on how the senior executives who commissioned the work interacted with and enabled it.To employees accustomed to being told to be rational and objective,design-thinking methods can seem uncomfortably emotive.Being asked not to quickly converge on an answer can be difficult for people accustomed to valuing a clear direction,cost savings,and finishing sooner rather than later.Iterative prototyping and testing call on employees to repeatedly experience something they’ve historically tried to avoid:failure.Consequently,those who are unfamiliar with design thinking need guidance and support from leaders to navigate the landscape and productively channel their reactions to the approach.The authors have identified practices that executives can use to stay on top of such innovation projects and lead them to success.

HBR Reprint R1902F

FEATURES

MANAGING PEOPLE

THE FEEDBACK FALLACY

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall

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For years managers have been encouraged to candidly praise and criticize just about everything workers do.But it turns out that feedback does not help employees thrive.First,research shows that people can’t reliably rate the performance of others:More than 50% of your rating of someone reflects your characteristics,not hers.Second,neuroscience reveals that criticism provokes the brain’s“fight or flight”response and inhibits learning.Last,excellence looks different for each individual,so it can’t be defined in advance and transferred from one person to another.It’s also not the opposite of failure.Managers will never produce great performance by identifying what they think is failure and telling people how to correct it.

Instead,when managers see a great outcome,they should turn to the person who created it,say,“Yes!That!,”and share their impression of why it was a success.Neuroscience shows that we grow most when people focus on our strengths.Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well,not what we’re doing poorly,and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly.

HBR Reprint R1902G