Is executive development the same thing as leadership development? The short answer is, ‘it depends on who you ask.’ You’ll see the two phrases used almost interchangeably in many places – with leadership development often being used more broadly than executive development.
By using the two terms this way, we’re missing out on what could be a helpful distinction.
While executives need to lead, not all leaders will become executives. Similarly, there are executive responsibilities that are not leadership responsibilities.
It amounts to developing strategy versus tactics if you need an effective shorthand to tell the two apart.
Strategies are the big picture, while tactics focus more precisely on the nitty-gritty.
To be effective, a company needs both. It requires an overarching vision, and it needs people capable of implementing that vision.
It helps if some people can do both (i.e., executives with developed leadership skills), but that’s not always what you’re going to find.
Leadership Development
Leadership development often happens outside of university classrooms. It can be done internally in companies or by specialists from outside.
Often, it will include tutoring and mentoring. The main focus is on building a cycle where leadership skills are taught, field-tested, and reflected on.
There is also a real focus on finding out how the leader’s personality is considered and how they deal with specific types of problems.
Often, the idea is to focus on what works rather than why it does. That’s the nature of teachers, who are often not academic but know a great deal about their field’.
And so, while they have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t, they don’t necessarily have the numbers or the theory to back it up.
The big problem with leadership development is that qualities vary based on who does the teaching and the learning and how much support there is within the company.
In some companies, the focus is to learn through doing, and the idea that leadership can be developed is waved off as something that doesn’t work.
Executive Development
To develop executives, most companies send them back to school. They’ll follow university courses dedicated to theory.
For example, at Stanford, the program teaches you to ‘analyze critically, lead confidently, and articulate strategically.’
And though they promise hands-on teaching, the actual application only happens when you return to your company after the course and implement it.
Such courses will offer to:
- Improve things like analytics so that business leaders can have a more holistic approach to the companies that they’re working in and thereby make better executive decisions.
- Gain a better understanding and awareness of one’s leadership style and how others perceive it.
- Enhance your understanding of the critical interface between execution issues and internal and external strategic challenges to the organization.
- Apply design thinking principles to solve business problems. Learn effective ways of designing teams, business operations, change management initiatives, and organizational structures and culture.
- Introduction to and comprehensive explanation of the relevant psychological principles needed to create cohesive teams and a beneficial corporate structure to boost performance, motivation, and results.
- Work on improving one’s interpersonal skills so that it becomes easier to communicate ideas, objectives, goals, and ambitions.
All of these are often supported by theoretical findings in the field.
In other words, these courses are quite theoretical. Of course, executive development is only effective if the people involved have the capacity to take what they learn and apply it in the field. Not everybody can do that.
For that reason, executive development is generally restricted to a small group of people.
They’re Taught the Wrong Way Around
Interestingly, while people get enrolled in leadership development quite early on, executive development often takes a lot longer.
Though that makes sense on a financial level, that does leave something to be desired on a strategic level.
After all, we want people first to know why they do something and, only then, to learn how to do it.
This way, they will find it easier to incorporate the lessons of ‘how’ as they’ll have the theoretical framework to answer their questions and understand the reasons.
By doing it backward, you’re not giving people the framework. You’re also making it likely that by the time they receive the underlying theoretical basis for why they do things, the way they’re doing things has been too baked in to be easily changed.
In effect, that’s putting the cart in front of the horse and leading to human translation problems.
In a Perfect World
In a perfect world, the right business leaders would follow both of these types of development simultaneously so that they might reinforce each other, with the theoretical and the practical getting taught hand in hand.
Of course, identifying who those business leaders would be might be difficult.
After all, there are many different types of leaders out there, and we can’t know beforehand which will be effective in what situation.
And trying to send every potential leader to an executive program would become prohibitively expensive.
A better idea would be for companies to have trainers who have gone through executive development courses instead.
This way, they’ll be capable of giving a much better idea of the theoretical underpinnings of many of the leadership classes they would be teaching.
Even better, if trainers were to follow executive development courses before they taught leadership at a company or business, then the question of whether executive development and leadership development are two different things would become moot, as we’d be bringing the two different forms of development closer together.
And that would no doubt be good for everybody involved.
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