How do you know what each leader needs to practise?
Most leadership programmes choose the topic for the group. Communication, feedback, leading through change. That makes sense for a session. It makes less sense for the weeks afterwards, when each leader goes back to their own team, their own pressures and their own difficult relationship.
If nobody has asked what this particular leader needs to practise, they will do one of two things. They will try a bit of everything, or they will wait for the next session. Neither gives the learning anywhere to go.
So the first job is not the practice. It is the focus.
Why does the focus matter so much?
Because practice only helps if it is the right practice. A leader who is already clear and honest gains little from working on clarity. A leader whose team keeps finding out about problems too late gains a great deal from working on early warnings, and may never have connected the two.
The research on leadership training points the same way. Lacerenza and colleagues looked across 335 studies and found that programmes based on a needs analysis were more effective. That finding is mostly about the programme as a whole. The same logic applies to each person: the closer the practice is to what they actually need, the more likely it is to be used.
In my experience, this is the step programmes skip most often. Not because anyone thinks it is unimportant, but because it is hard to do for forty people before a session.
What are the two questions to ask?
There are two different questions here, and they need two different tools.
In general, which behaviours does this leader do least often? This is about their habits across all their work. It suits development conversations, leadership programmes and anyone who wants a broad picture. In Trust Leader, the Self-Assessment asks how often, over the last 30 days, they have done each of the twenty behaviours that strengthen trust, and shows the ones they report doing least.
In one working relationship that matters, what does the other person need to rely on them for? This is about one person: a sponsor, a team member, a peer. It suits a leader who already knows which relationship is under strain. The Trust Map uses the five Trust Questions to look at what that person cares about most and where their confidence may be thinner than the leader thinks.
Both end in the same place: one behaviour to practise. They just start from different questions.
Can you trust a leader’s view of themselves?
Not on its own, and it is worth being straight about that.
Dunning, Heath and Suls reviewed decades of research and found that people’s views of their own ability have only a modest relationship with how they actually perform. Most of us are not very good judges of ourselves.
That does not make a self-assessment useless. It changes what it is for. It is a starting point for a conversation, not a verdict. Two things help:
- Ask about behaviour, not ability. “How often did you give an update before someone had to chase you?” is easier to answer honestly than “How good are you at communicating?”
- Look at it from the other person’s side. The Trust Map asks the leader to think about how one specific person experiences them. It is still their view, but it is a view pointed outwards, at someone they can check it with.
How do you get from a gap to one behaviour?
Start from the change you want someone to experience, then choose the behaviour most likely to produce it.
Brown and colleagues found, in one management programme, that goals framed as the outcome someone wanted transferred better than goals framed as an action. It is one study, but it puts the order right. “I want my sponsor to hear about risks while there is still time to act” is a better starting point than “I will send more updates”.
Then pick one. Not three. With one behaviour, the leader can tell afterwards what their part was.
What can L&D do before the session?
You do not need a full diagnostic for every leader. You need each of them to arrive with a focus.
- Ask leaders to take the Self-Assessment, or map one relationship, before the session. It takes minutes, and the session can start from what they found.
- Use the session to test the focus, not to choose it from scratch. Pairs can ask each other: what would the other person notice if you did this more?
- Agree one behaviour each, written down. It becomes the thread for the practice that follows and the thing you review later.
If you want to see where your current programme stands on this, the Programme Check asks about it directly, along with the other three stages.
Where this fits
Knowing what to practise is the first of four stages. Leaders also need the right things to practise, the chance to practise in real work, and a way to see what changed. See how the four stages fit together, or follow one leader through them in the Hub.