Could you benefit from Belonging to a Peer-to-Peer Network?

The old recipes for making a firm a talent factory have eroded. Executive development programs provided formal training specific to organizational levels, and employees were expected to remain with their organizations for long careers. Today, tenures are getting shorter, there are fewer layers and leaders are being thrust into situations for which many feel unprepared. Might a peer network help address the gaps?

The way it used to be…

Executive development, or more specifically executive education, truly got going in the United States and Europe after the second world war.  Universities such as Harvard introduced the “Advanced Management Program” and other high-level courses designed to teach practical business leadership skills to executives who might have experience in family firms or in the military but not in the increasingly large global firms that represented an ever-larger portion of the economies of much of the developed world.

In addition to university-based programs, many companies created their own customized curricula often taught on a corporate campus, such as GE’s Crotonville facility. It’s 1956 opening was aimed at the mission of making General Electric the “best managed” company in the world.  Indeed, for a while there, being invited to teach at Crotonville was a real feather in the caps of business school professors everywhere. Several generations of GE leaders made the trip to the bucolic resort to personally lead sessions and a well-staffed human resource and training group expertly managed the learning journeys for many a GE manager.

Times have changed.  As Wharton’s Peter Cappelli notes, by 2022 the company had decided to sell off its iconic center.  At its peak, Crotonville reportedly had a $1 billion budget.   And GE wasn’t alone – IBM had multiple corporate training centers which it sold.  The closures signaled a big change in attitudes about executive development.  As Cappelli says,

“There will be even less planned career advancement, fewer systematic opportunities to develop the abilities of leaders and, more generally, less opportunity for individuals in these jobs to stop and think about what they are doing and how to do it. To the extent that these facilities and the programs they run are about passing along the norms and values of operating that create organizational cultures, their closure means fewer organizations have clear and distinctive ways of operating.”

Further, companies with lots of hierarchical layers and global operations could move people around to different roles – increasing their responsibility as they matured, and protecting the organization to some extent from rookie mistakes.  This was so central to the operations of companies such as Unilever that employees used to joke about the process as “Unileverization.”

Increasingly, when it comes to developing great leaders, companies are stepping back and somehow hoping that leaders themselves will figure it out.

Leaders are struggling – and leaving

Part of the result is that the networks built within companies have become frayed, even as tenure in roles has shortened and more leaders are being hired from outside the organization rather than promoted from within it.  A recent report by Deloitte finds that although work has changed and jobs of leaders have become more challenging, leaders are not being suitably prepared.  Indeed, only 23 percent of respondents to a recent survey they did felt their leadership was ready for the demands of the post-pandemic workforce.

A Wharton report, based on research by Development Dimensions found that less than half of the leaders they spoke to felt confident that they had necessary skills in building talent, managing change, digital skills, and strategic thinking.  These gaps seem to be borne out in the CEO turnover statics – after a pause in the midst of the pandemic, Russell Reynolds finds an increase in CEO turnover globally, and of course when the CEO turns over so do many of the executives who were part of their teams.

None of this is particularly great for companies, either.  Indeed, lack of access to developmental opportunities was cited as a major reason why people leave their jobs.

An emerging solution – the peer-to-peer network or forum

What we are now beginning to see is the emergence of new kinds of learning networks.  Called many different things, they offer a combination of peer-to-peer support, social support, safe places to share challenges and dilemmas and curated content.  Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and now a professor at Harvard has called them “True North Groups.”  They take a number of forms, from the well-established Young Presidents’ Organization model to formally organized groups such as those associated with universities to more informal groups dedicated to helping peers find peers and create community.

What these groups have in common are:

• Rigorous curation of members

• Mutual commitment to problem solving and supporting one another

• A cadence of meetings

• Diversity of perspectives

• Ability to hold one another accountable

• Commitment to learning and growth for all members

Would something like this be useful for you?

In our work with leaders in organizations, we’re finding a few characteristics that we think might indicate a peer group could be helpful.  Once they get to a certain level, we’ve noticed that executive anxiety goes through the roof.  It’s nerve-wracking to be working in high uncertainty all the time and to be responsible for your organization’s sense-making role. It’s lonely – often, you feel as though nobody knows what you are going through.  And it’s easy to feel socially isolated.

If this sounds like you (or you know someone it does sound like), we’d love to chat and better understand this new phenomenon.   You can reach out at https://www.valize.com/site/contact.

After all, our organizations can only grow and flourish to the extent that our leaders do.