A bright spot on the leadership development horizon
Rita McGrath
Thought Sparks
Introduction
Field notes from the final installment of my time delivering a custom executive education program for Genentech.
What if we invest in developing our people and they leave?
What if we don’t and they stay??
This old joke has started to take on a level of reality that I am surprised by, with companies largely abandoning the systematic development experiences that often accompanied their career planning process.
I mean when even GE sells off their famed Crotonville facility, you know big changes in the learning space are afoot – not all of them positive. But there are still some bright spots, as I’m fond of saying, in corporate education efforts. One such bright spot is the executive education program I lead for Genentech, which culminated last week. This is part of their gLEAD (Leadership for Executive Advancement and Development) which aims to accelerate the advancement of talent across the company in novel ways.
Day One
Day two
I kicked off our second day Genentech with my work on Seeing Around Corners, with a discussion of why companies so often miss what I'll call “gray swans".
These are not “black swans” which are genuinely unprecedented events but are turning points for which we've had a lot of data and signals, but the timing is not clear. We gained more insight into why companies have so much difficulty coping with those. The team was pretty enthusiastic about embracing some of my frameworks how exactly you can see around corners, by picking up on early warnings, weak signals, and leading indicators.
Day Three
Thursday marked our group presentations, which many of the senior leaders have said was just the best day in their year. We talked about topics like digital health. We also discussed how to get people into an executive development pipeline, and help them feel a real sense of belonging. Part of this conversation was discussing how we might use AI and other digital tools to achieve these goals of development and belonging.
Rita McGrath
https://thoughtsparks.substack.com/