One Size Might Fit Some

One size doesn’t fit all in leadership development. At best, one size might fit some.

Personalized leadership development is learning built around the individual leader: their strengths, their beliefs, their situation and what they need next. Most organizations know they should do it, unfortunately few do it well.
I shared this idea recently at Virtual LeaderCon, and it resonated with the group, so I am writing it about it now.

Why Does Leadership Development Fit Only Some Leaders?

Leadership is hard. I’ve worked with leaders at NASA who built rockets before they led people. Ask them which is harder: building rockets or leading people. They consistently said leading people. After all, rockets don’t talk back. After 70 years of building them, the physics of propulsion and space travel gives you a limited number of right answers.

People give you many possible answers! They are talented, messy, inconsistent and human. There is more than one way to lead well.

And yet most organizations pick a course, an event or a program and put everyone through it. For some leaders, it changes everything. For others, it makes a small difference that fades. The “size and shape” of these events fit some, but not nearly everyone.

If you work in L&D or HR, you can name people in both groups.

What Makes One Leader Different from Another?

At least three things.

• Identity, Strengths and Style. Who you are as a leader shapes how you lead. Assessments like DISC and CliftonStrengths help people see that, and I’m a fan. I’m also careful with them. You are more than a single letter or color or strength.
• Mindset. What you believe about people, about work and about leading matters. Two leaders in the same room can hold very different beliefs, and they will take the same lesson in different directions (if they even accept it at all).
• Context. Some leaders run a team of twelve, others a team of three. Some started leading two weeks ago, others twenty years ago. Some see their people every day, others rarely. Your starting point and goals are just two examples of what can change what the next step should be.

What Does a Personalized Path Look Like?

Whether you’re building your own or your organization’s, it includes:

• Needs. What does this leader need from the learning, and from the result?
• Style and preferences. How do they like to learn? What has worked for them before?
• Options. Books, courses, peers, podcasts, YouTube, AI tools. The choices are better than ever, and people use them whether the organization has a plan.
• An order and a plan. What comes first, and how will it happen?

Organizations are pretty good at the last one. We’re much less good at personalizing it. Do your leaders get a plan, or do they have a chance to help build the plan?

Where Do Mindset, Skill Set and Habit Set Fit?

Too often we only talk about skillset. Skills matter, but they stick only when they connect to what the leader believes. If the story a leader tells themselves doesn’t match the skill, progress stalls.

Then comes habitset. People may know the steps and have a checklist, but still not use any of it.

Mindset and habitset are the two ends where people differ most: conviction, confidence, how relevant the skill feels, how much trying it matters to them. In my session, I asked attendees which of these their organizations handle least well. Mindset and habitset were the common gaps.

Why Is Coaching the Most Personal Path?

A good coach knows you. Watch three people give the same presentation and a good coach gives each of them different coaching, based on style, on need, on the follow-up questions that fit, on tone of voice and a hundred other things.

Coaching comes in two sizes. “Little c” coaching comes from a peer or someone across the organization. “Big C” coaching comes from your boss, an external coach or someone in L&D. All can, and likely will, personalize their approach to coaching different people.

Both also have a limit. The weekly coaching call or the next one-on-one is not here right now, and right now you have a decision to make.

Where Does Claridus Fit?

That gap is why we’re building Claridus. It is an AI platform that learns who you are as a leader: your style, your strengths, your story and your mindset. It coaches you in the moment, with 30 years of how we coach leaders behind it. It starts with our Bud to Boss content and will soon grow to include more of ours and other experts’, so you get the content you need (and can trust) and not whatever turns up on the internet.

If you’d like to see it, I’ll spend a free hour with you and anyone else in your organization who should be there. About half is working through the leadership challenges you face, and half is a demo. You’ll leave with something useful even if Claridus isn’t right for you. You can request that hour at Claridus.ai.

If you think your organization needs this but don’t hold the budget, the same page has a Champion Kit to help you introduce it to others in your organization.

Where is one size fitting some of your leaders, and who is it missing?