Why Your Team May Enjoy My Rant: Leadership Development is a Waste of Time and Money

September 12, 2023

I had a very respectable campus leader (let’s call her Maria) candidly share that she was not excited about the opportunity to leave several high-priority tasks to attend an executive team kick-off retreat last month.

“This is not about you, Joe. I’m just saying that I have never found these types of events impactful to the work. In fact, I generally believe leadership training and leadership development is a total waste of time and money.”

I raise a glass to toast Maria in this month’s post. I will put myself out there and say, I agree with you, doc!

Hear What I Am Not Saying

Seriously… Don’t bother. I am not saying LEADERSHIP is a waste of time. I am saying the development, or more specifically, the way we currently train leaders is a waste of time and money if you draw a tight circle around the return (results) on the investment.

If you prefer to avoid my rant and simply get something practical, skip to the end of this post. I list seven questions you should answer in the affirmative before doing any leadership team development.

Otherwise, commence rant…

The past decade has been a struggle for me. I have failed to create an overwhelmingly “plug-and-play” leadership guide for all humanity to change the trajectory of campus performance.

I have developed fancy models, checklists, bold statements, processes, principles, fortune cookie sayings, and so much more over the last ten years.

But, no… I have not created anything I believe has helped executive teams (and their teams) put more points on the board. Much of what I have taught and coached has helped deepen the Lead Measures and the reliability of Systems to put more points on the board, but my focus of this post is on leadership.

I have taken the position that leadership is skill-based. You either have it or you don’t. If a campus leader applies a set of skills competently and consistently, they will effectively evolve into a leader worth following.

I also hold the position that leadership is contextual. In other words, successfully navigating situations makes the leader (more confident and competent). However, please note that none of these sticks-in-the-sand have produced better leaders.

The problem is that if I want to teach people to be better leaders as a consultant, coach, and trainer, I must teach it as a linear truth with little tolerance for variation. This would be taught as a best practice or a standard, right?

But, alas, I don’t think leadership is teachable as a best practice or a standard. Leaders are born and then made by circumstances, struggles, pain, and setbacks, seasoned with a healthy dose of mentoring via genuine relationships along the way.

Oh, and the successful ones must tip their hat to a boatload of luck (GRACE) if they are honest.

In other words, my programs don't yield what they are hyped-up to deliver — Leaders.

Honestly, I observe my colleagues doing similar work yielding no better results.

Leadership is kind of a skill, but mostly an art form developed over a lifetime of modeling, trial, and error, reflection, and adaptation.

As the boss, you define leadership. Your choice - the good kind or the wrong kind. Over time, this becomes your leadership culture. If you define leadership as a set of behaviors, you then teach your people the importance of those behaviors. However, just because you define leadership as a set of behaviors does not mean that applying those behaviors yields LEADERSHIP.

You also must define leadership outcomes to follow those behaviors, and you must see that those behaviors yield those outcomes all the time to claim that they reliably give you LEADERSHIP.

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According to Google, there are thousands and thousands of hits for the word leadership. I am pretty sure, without analyzing them all that there is no common application of the word, which leaves us with the problem identified above… How do you define LEADERSHIP in a helpful way to teach it uniformly and scale it consistently?

It has been argued that many focused hours of practice can help develop one into an expert.

This argument is missing one of the critical components of the original research. (In fact, in his book, Outliers, often overlooked when people reference it, Malcolm Gladwell says the same thing.) That talent must also be present, and the talented person must have a support system in place to allow them to develop their innate talent (and skill) while they practice.

Innate talent is essential. When I teach leadership skills, it either sticks or does not stick based on the talent the leader already has. Working to apply leadership skills on a doofus will still be inadequate leadership no matter how extensive the practice, development, or weighty the experience.

You can lead wherever you are is a paradigm held across most campuses across the country. This ideal is honorable, and I believe that all people have the ability to influence across their spheres of influence. The question is, with what potency (results-based impact)?

Campuses across the country spend millions of dollars in conferences, seminars, team trainings, and the like, to raise up leaders, but rarely, if at all, do any of these systems run a return on the investment on these interventions.

“Working to apply leadership skills on a doofus will still be inadequate leadership no matter how extensive the practice, development, or weighty the experience.”

Or, if one breaks down the skills into a set of skills or best practices, rarely do they align to a universal set of skills needed to get the work done to the next level. Rather, leadership has become just another word for launching initiatives, project management, and supervision of your division of employees.

From what I have studied, the great leaders of history (Lincoln, Alexander, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Khan, Charlemagne, Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, et al.) never were (fill in the blank) award winners. They didn’t have certificates of completion nailed to their office walls indicating they were “in sessions” to become better leaders.

And, if we did an analysis of all the countless participants in your system who enrolled in training programs or leadership development initiatives, how many of them have become great as a direct result of those initiatives? For those who did, would they have achieved their success regardless of the training? In many ways, I would argue a big Fat YES.

Is this a valid argument?

Great leaders historically did not advance their influence and impact using the methods incorporated in the training and development industry space (which is quite lucrative). With the advent of social marketing tactics, we are being bombarded by consultants and trainers who utterly believe their training methods produce GREAT LEADERS.

Prove it.

Show the return, and I will eat my left sock and come to work as your senior director of sales.

Leadership is an ability, that requires a set of circumstances, that requires luck, and that requires followers who are inspired. Analyses of historical leadership have never produced the same set of criteria between leaders. In other words, no two leaders are the same. Great books providing comparative analyses of leaders are found in plenty and rarely profess similar conclusions.

So, it is with conceit that we believe leadership is universally teachable via a shiny product or program that can be boiled down to a simple set of standards or best practices. It is even with greater hubris that we think the same leadership ability is within all of us. In my work, I encounter loads and loads of leaders (in title) who are not LEADING (results).

Just sayin.’

Here’s my challenge to you. The next time you are fixin’ to bring in someone to do leadership development, ask yourself the following questions. They are in no particular order.

Why? What are you hoping leadership development will do for you? Really answer this question as explicitly and specifically as possible. The more specific you can be, the more likely you will identify the true training opportunity or the true organization development problem that needs solving.
Is there something, or a situation in the organization that requires transformation? In other words, is there an opportunity to totally reinvent your success system?
Do you want your people to actually lead? According to James MacGregor Burns, leadership is defined as mobilizing a group of people from point A to point B. Is there a vivid Point B to move people toward?
Do your people have the innate talent to become leaders? Do they have good character, chemistry, competence, and credibility? Do they have hunger, humility, and smarts?
Does the organizational structure and culture allow your people to lead? Is the structure set up to allow leaders at lower levels in the organization to actually lead? If not, why bother?
Should you be developing all, or a few of them who (in turn) will lead the rest?
Do you have a framework for quality leadership? What common tools, language, and methodologies can be used to multiply these ideals across your system?

My guess is that most of the questions above may be answered with hope and a shoulder shrug.

Good News!

The development that followed my encounter with Maria had all 5s in the following categories:

The development experience treated leaders as engaged learners.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The topic focus was deep enough to provide tools to immediately impact our practice.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Follow-up support and discussion questions were made available to reinforce the learning.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
The development session allowed team time to focus the learning on a team challenge with opportunities to coach each other to problem solve.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
The development session provided measures of team accountability by asking how previous session tools had been applied in common practice.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
The development session was geared to equip our team with the tools, language, and methodology to advance our performance objectives as results.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

Wrap Up

Yes, many leaders may want to fist-bump Maria because they have experienced a myriad of wasted time, resources, and productivity due to poor executive PD. The good news is that there are many great examples out there where Executive Team Coaching moved campus leaders to become system influencers who raised the standard of organizational culture, organizational clarity, and overall performance improvement.

Let’s turn those instances (from best practice to Better Practice) into the new status quo.

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Simply put, leading people and systems has never been more complex.

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Whether it's leading results-based teams, communicating with success, improving your engagement, increasing influence, refreshing your vision, building trusting communities, or many other challenges we face as campus leaders, you'll know exactly what steps to take to generate momentum for your community.

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Higher Performance Insights | The 5 (Wildly) Popular Best Practices Keeping You Stuck

By HPG Info • August 12, 2025

Trade Up or Stay Mediocre Last Tuesday at 7:23 AM, Principal David Martinez stared at his annual evaluation. "Meets expectations." Check. "Satisfactory performance." Check. "Adequate progress." Check. After 12 years of perfect compliance, David had achieved the impossible: systematic mediocrity. His test scores lived at the 50th percentile. His teacher turnover matched district averages. His parent surveys reflected the predictable bell curve. Every "best practice" from graduate school, implemented flawlessly. The result? Perfect ordinary. Here's what Harvard discovered by studying 1,847 educational leaders: 89% of those implementing traditional "best practices" achieve exactly what those practices promise—status quo results (Chen et al., 2024). Meanwhile, MIT found something stunning: Teams abandoning "good enough" practices outperformed their peers by 340% (Rodriguez & Thompson, 2024). The truth nobody talks about? Best practices weren't designed for excellence. They were designed to prevent failure. In today's world, preventing failure is the express lane to irrelevance. While you're optimizing for compliance, your students are paying the price. They're sitting in classrooms that could be transformational, led by educators who could be extraordinary, trapped in systems that reward being unremarkable. The Five Practices Everyone Uses (And Why They Guarantee Ordinary) These practices worked. Once. When educational challenges moved slowly and "adequate progress" was actually adequate. Those days ended. Today demands breakthrough thinking, not best-practice thinking. Innovation, not implementation. Collective intelligence, not individual expertise. Yet most leaders still optimize for ordinary. Here's how—and what to do instead. PRACTICE 1: DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING Why everyone loves it: Having data used to be revolutionary. Numbers instead of hunches. Accountability where none existed. Why it now guarantees ordinary: Everyone has data now. Your dashboard looks like everyone else's dashboard. Data tells you what happened yesterday. It can't tell you what questions to ask about tomorrow. Those 47-slide PowerPoint presentations? They're creativity killers disguised as leadership tools. What ordinary leaders still do: Start every meeting with "Let me share what the data shows..." Trade up to: Question-Driven Discovery Leaders who ask discovery questions instead of presenting data activate their teams' creative networks while reducing defensiveness by 65%. Instead of "What does the data show?" ask "What questions would unlock our team's best thinking?" Superintendent Rodriguez made this shift. Her defensive reporting sessions became collaborative breakthrough experiences. Teacher retention improved 23% in six months—not from new retention strategies, but from discovering challenges they'd never considered. PRACTICE 2: DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP Why everyone loves it: Sharing the load made sense when principals were expected to know everything. More involvement, better buy-in. Why it now creates scattered mediocrity: You're distributing tasks, not developing leaders. Multiple people working individually isn't collective intelligence. It's parallel processing that creates conflicting priorities. Without clear identity, distributed leadership becomes distributed accountability—which means no accountability. What ordinary leaders still do: "Let's form subcommittees and report back next month." Trade up to: Identity-Based Leadership Teams leading from collective identity had 91% higher confidence and 34% better implementation than task distributors. Instead of "Who can take this project?" ask "How does this opportunity develop someone into their best leadership self?" You're not the Chief Task Distributor. You're the Chief Purpose Keeper. Principal Jackson discovered this when her school faced budget cuts. Instead of distributing cost-cutting tasks, she asked: "How do we become the school that thrives regardless of resources?" Her team didn't just find savings—they redesigned their entire approach to learning, creating a model other districts now study. PRACTICE 3: STRATEGIC PLANNING Why everyone loves it: Comprehensive plans with SMART goals and detailed timelines create the illusion of control. Why it's now theater: You're planning for a world that no longer exists. Strategic plans assume emotional robots will implement them. Real humans have feelings that derail every logical plan. You spend more time updating plans than creating results. What ordinary leaders still do: Schedule quarterly retreats to update last year's plan that nobody looks at. Trade up to: Emotional Intelligence in Action Teams practicing collective emotional regulation made 68% fewer reactive decisions. Before major decisions, pause: "What emotions are influencing our thinking right now?" Feel the pressure. Acknowledge it as information. Choose responses based on reality, not anxiety. PRACTICE 4: PROFESSIONAL LEARNING COMMUNITIES Why everyone loves it: Structured collaboration time was revolutionary when teachers worked in isolation. Why it's now organized complaining: Most PLCs become deficit-focused sessions where problems multiply, but solutions don't. Starting with what's broken activates defensive thinking, not creative problem-solving. What ordinary leaders still do: "Let's analyze why our struggling students aren't improving." Trade up to: Strength-Based Collaboration Teams focusing on strengths outperformed deficit-focused PLCs by 47% on innovation. Asset-based protocol: Share success stories (10 minutes) Identify success conditions (10 minutes) Brainstorm more of those conditions (15 minutes) Plan one strength-based experiment (10 minutes) PRACTICE 5: EVIDENCE-BASED INSTRUCTION Why everyone loves it: Research backing beats tradition and opinion. Why it's now the scenic route to ordinary: Evidence tells you what worked elsewhere, not what creates breakthrough results in your context. You're implementing someone else's solution to someone else's problem. Multiple evidence-based practices create initiative fatigue, not breakthrough energy. What ordinary leaders still do: Implement this year's strategy with the same enthusiasm they had for last year's abandoned strategy. Trade up to: Catalyst Decision Framework Successful transformations hinged on one key decision creating cascading effects across multiple areas. Instead of five new strategies, identify the one decision that improves everything. One principal chose protected daily collaboration time. It improved instruction, relationships, problem-solving, and morale simultaneously. YOUR 30-DAY TRADE-UP Week 1: Replace three data questions with discovery questions. Week 2: Write who you are as a team (not what you do). Lead from that identity. Week 3: Ask about emotions before every major decision. Week 4: Replace one problem meeting with strength exploration. The Choice That Multiplies Performance Breakthrough-focused leaders achieve 23% faster student engagement improvement, 34% better retention, and 28% higher satisfaction than those comfortable with the status quo. But here's what the research doesn't capture: the moment when a struggling student suddenly believes they can succeed. The day a burnt-out teacher remembers why they became an educator. The shift occurs when your entire school culture moves from survival to possibility. That doesn't happen when you're optimizing for compliance. Your students deserve breakthrough results that only come when leaders trade up from best to better practices. The question isn't whether you can create breakthrough results. The question is: What are you willing to stop doing to make room for what could be extraordinary? TRANSFORM YOUR TEAM'S INTELLIGENCE Stop hoping best practices will create breakthrough results. Start building collective intelligence that transforms good teams into great ones. Discover your TEAM INTELLIGENCE quotient in 5 minutes per member: Where you default to individual vs. collective thinking Which perspectives enhance group intelligence How to transform challenging dynamics into breakthrough collaboration Take the 5-Minute Leadership Team Assessment →

Higher Performance Insights | THE PARALYSIS TAX

By HPG Info • August 5, 2025

Why Standing Still Costs More Than Moving Forward - Leader Insights for Campus and District Leaders Last Tuesday at 9:30 AM, you gathered your most trusted leadership team to discuss AI policy implementation. The stakes felt enormous—student futures, academic integrity, competitive positioning, all hanging in the balance. Two hours later, you'd facilitated an excellent discussion. Thoughtful questions raised. Valid concerns explored. Multiple perspectives honored. And made zero decisions. While your team debated implementation frameworks, six-year-olds in Beijing finished their mandatory AI literacy class—not as a pilot program, but as core curriculum required by the Chinese government starting this fall. Here's the research finding that stopped me cold: 89% of students already use ChatGPT for homework, yet only 35% of education leaders have concrete implementation plans —despite 97% recognizing AI's transformational benefits.¹ The uncomfortable truth? This article isn't really about AI. It's about the decision-making paralysis that's quietly bleeding your institution's competitive advantage while you perfect your process. B - The Hidden Crisis Behind Brilliant Teams I call it the Paralysis Tax —the compounding cost of choosing certainty over progress, perfection over momentum. Recent MIT research reveals something that challenges everything we believe about high-performing leadership teams: The institutions paying the highest Paralysis Tax aren't those with incompetent leaders. They're the ones with brilliant leaders who can't decide together. ² Dr. Sarah Chen's groundbreaking study of 847 educational leadership teams found that cognitive diversity—typically an asset—becomes a liability when teams lack protocols for leveraging different thinking styles. The result? Paralysis disguised as thoroughness. The Analytics Pattern : Data-driven leaders research comprehensive AI statistics but miss critical human adoption dynamics unfolding in real-time. The Harmony Pattern : Relationship-focused leaders prioritize stakeholder comfort over necessary change, inadvertently protecting the status quo. The Systems Pattern : Process-oriented leaders create policies that are perfectly efficient but systematically exclude innovation opportunities. The Innovation Pattern : Visionary leaders pursue cutting-edge solutions while overlooking essential infrastructure and change management needs. The Results Pattern : Performance-focused leaders push for immediate wins without establishing sustainable frameworks, resulting in implementation chaos. Each pattern brings essential value. But teams trapped in pattern dominance pay the Paralysis Tax while competitors methodically pull ahead. R - What Research Reveals About Decision Velocity Harvard Business School's three-year study tracking 500 educational institutions exposes the compound cost of decision paralysis with startling clarity:³ Strategy Paralysis : Teams spending 40% more time in planning phases without measurably increasing implementation success rates Innovation Stagnation : Institutions falling 18 months behind early adopters in student preparedness metrics that matter to employers Talent Exodus : 23% higher turnover among innovative educators in institutions with chronically slow decision-making processes Student Disadvantage : Graduates entering a workforce where AI literacy has shifted from a bonus skill to a baseline expectation Stanford's Leadership Institute research adds another dimension: Teams with time-bounded decision-making processes demonstrate 64% higher implementation success rates and 27% greater team satisfaction.⁴ The most expensive cost? Watching peer institutions systematically pull ahead while you're still forming exploratory committees. E - The Chinese Advantage: Cognitive Balance in Action China's remarkable AI education momentum isn't about superior resources or governmental mandate—it's about cognitive balance in collective decision-making . Their national AI education guidelines integrate technical training with ethical reasoning, individual skill development with collaborative applications, and innovation acceleration with systematic implementation protocols.⁵ While Western institutions agonize over academic integrity policies, Chinese universities teach responsible AI use as core competency. The measurable result? Nearly 60% of faculty and students use AI tools multiple times daily within clear ethical frameworks. ⁶ They're not smarter than us. They're not better funded than us. They're thinking differently TOGETHER. This is what breakthrough looks like when teams develop what MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence calls "Team Intelligence"—the capacity to leverage all cognitive perspectives in service of collective action rather than collective analysis. A - HOW TO: Transform Analysis Paralysis Into Strategic Action Step 1: Diagnose Your Team's Cognitive Imbalance (10 minutes) - Before your next strategic meeting, ask each team member to complete this rapid assessment: "What's your primary concern about [current challenge] implementation?" (Listen for pattern dominance) "What would need to be true for you to confidently support moving forward?" (Identify activation conditions) "What's the measurable cost of waiting another semester to act?" (Create urgency alignment) Pattern recognition is everything. Analytics leaders will cite research gaps. Harmony leaders will mention stakeholder resistance. Systems leaders will identify process deficiencies. Innovation leaders will point to infrastructure limitations. Results leaders will emphasize timeline pressures. Step 2: Practice "Loving Your Opposites" (Structured Integration) - Harvard research demonstrates that teams with cognitive diversity outperform homogeneous teams by 87% on complex decisions—but only when they have explicit protocols for leveraging these differences.⁷ Use this exact language sequence in your next decision-making session: "I need to understand how [opposite perspective] would strengthen our approach to this challenge." "What specific evidence would you need to see to feel confident about this direction?" "How can we honor both [innovation/stability, speed/thoroughness, individual/collective needs] in our implementation strategy?" Step 3: Implement the 72-Hour Decision Protocol - Transform endless discussion into bounded decision-making: Hour 1-24 : Individual preparation using each member's cognitive strengths Hour 25-48 : Collective decision-making session with structured perspective integration Hour 49-72 : Implementation planning with type-specific accountability measures Warning: Teams resist time boundaries initially. Stay firm. Parkinson's Law applies to decision-making: Work expands to fill available time, including decision-making work. K - The Collective Intelligence Multiplier Effect Here's what breakthrough teams understand that struggling teams often miss: Individual expertise becomes exponentially more powerful when combined through collective intelligence protocols. MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence research tracking 1,000 educational leadership teams reveals that high-Team Intelligence (TQ) teams demonstrate:⁸ 40% faster problem resolution in complex, multi-stakeholder situations 27% higher team member satisfaction and retention rates 35% more strategic objectives achieved within original timelines 52% better stakeholder confidence in leadership decisions These teams don't avoid difficult challenges—they approach them systematically through cognitive balance rather than cognitive dominance. Phase 1: Cognitive Balance Integration - Ensure analytical rigor AND relational wisdom, systematic planning AND innovative exploration, immediate results AND long-term sustainability thinking are represented in every major decision. Phase 2: Collective Decision-Making Protocols - Transform natural tension into creative energy through structured processes that capture diverse perspectives and build trust through differences, not despite them. Phase 3: Synchronized Execution - Leverage each thinking style's implementation strengths by utilizing accountability systems designed for diverse approaches, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all monitoring. T - From Individual Brilliance to Collective Transformation Last week, a superintendent shared this with me: "We spent eight months developing our AI policy framework while our students taught themselves to use it and our competitor district launched their implementation." That's the Paralysis Tax extracted with compound interest. But here's the deeper pattern I see everywhere: How many institutions have spent the last four years—eight semesters—refining shared governance models while the world fundamentally transformed around them? Committee after committee. Framework after framework. Policy about how to make policies about policies. All while enrollment shifts, technology advances, workforce demands evolve, and students graduate into a reality we're still debating how to prepare them for. The institutions that consistently thrive don't wait for perfect processes. They start with imperfect action, guided by collective intelligence protocols. They leverage early adopters while systematically addressing implementation concerns. They teach ethical AI use through comprehensive practice rather than prohibition. They iterate their way to competitive advantage instead of waiting for competitors to prove viability. Your students deserve leaders who can think together as powerfully as they think individually. Your community deserves decision-making velocity that matches the pace of change they're navigating. The question isn't whether AI will transform education—that transformation is happening with or without your participation. The question is whether your leadership team will guide that transformation or be managed by it. H - Your Strategic Choice Point Every day you spend perfecting your decision-making process is a day your students fall further behind global peers who are learning to work WITH emerging realities, not around them. Will you pay the Paralysis Tax another semester? Or will you invest in the collective intelligence that transforms uncertainty into your system's strategic advantage? The Paralysis Tax compounds daily. But so does the competitive advantage of teams that learn to decide together as brilliantly as they analyze individually. Your choice. Your students' futures. Your legacy as leaders who could think together when it mattered most. READY TO TRANSFORM? Stop hoping individual experts will eventually coordinate better. Start building the collective intelligence that creates breakthrough results for students. The first step is understanding your team's current intelligence quotient. In just 5 minutes per team member, you can discover: Where your team defaults to individual rather than collective thinking Which cognitive perspectives naturally enhance group intelligence How to transform your most challenging dynamics into breakthrough collaboration Discover Your Team Intelligence → Take the 5-Minute Educational Leadership Team Assessment https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group