10 Jan Coffee or Leadership?

Welcome to 2024, may this year be successful in all aspects of our lives!

We are kicking off this year by interrogating some interesting statistics on Leadership Development, please join us on this journey!

Effective Leaders are instrumental in driving organisational success, we all know and believe this, right? Yet, in a global study by the Josh Bersin Academy, they found that that out of the more than 1000 organisations that took part in the study, 60% of the organisations were spending less than $500 per person per year on Management and Leadership Development (less than we spend on coffee per year in their opinion!).

As part of the study, they correlated HR investment areas against business growth and surprisingly, leadership development scores the highest. In other words, companies that focus on developing leaders (not just promoting them) far outperform their peers, so why this disconnect?

Disappointingly they also found that only 25% of companies believed that Leadership Development is delivering high value to their organisations. This is a worrisome statistic for us OD practitioners!

We are wondering whether this trend is also true for South Africa? 

At Worldsview Academy, we have certainly seen a decline in the importance and budget allocated to Leadership Development programmes since the pandemic, with a very slight uptick in enquiries but not much in spending in 2023.

We are wondering about the reasons for this and there might be many, some that we are pondering are: There was a shift in focus during the pandemic towards restoring operational functionality and addressing concerns related to employee burnout and retention. This reprioritisation may have lowered Leadership Development initiatives to a lower position on organisational agendas.

Another aspect worth exploring is whether decision-makers have failed to witness a tangible positive impact stemming from Leadership Development programs. This raises the question of whether the intended benefits are being realised or whether the impact is not effectively measured.