Chapter 1
Developing the Roberto Clementes of Leadership

One of my joys is diving into the backstories of leaders. I look for trends in their progress the same way I study baseball to see what separates the great from the good. I want to know what next-level leaders do to elevate above the average. Figuratively speaking, I want to know what makes them the Roberto Clementes of leadership-a baseball great known for his tireless contributions both on and off the field.

I find that the Clementes of leadership know how to deliver results in the face of extreme adversity. They have a keen sense of their core values, they work hard AND smart, they make sacrifices, they prioritize stakeholder value, and they continuously take on board new information to improve their game. They also know that leadership development (LD) is a focal point for greatness.

Whether it's onboarding high potentials, growing a network of informal leaders, or grooming the next generation of senior leaders, LD drives an organization's trajectory. It makes a significant impact on leadership capacity, and leadership capacity makes a significant impact on performance. LD, simply put, is at the center of sustainable growth.

The goal of this chapter is to help you nurture this growth with the latest in science and tech. We'll start with summarizing existing work to give you an idea of what experts know about LD. We'll then get to the details of how you can use computational leadership science (CLS) to foster next-level leadership. Finally, in the Q&A section, we'll see how IBM-one of the best at developing talent-is taking steps to boost its LD with digital innovations.

What We Know about Leadership Development

The concept and practice of LD has been around for decades, and experts have amassed a great deal of information in that time. I want to briefly touch on this mountain of information because it's a raw material waiting to be refined into 21st-century knowledge.

Interestingly, the current state of LD is similar to the premise of Michael Lewis's 2003 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, where the Oakland Athletics baseball team paired an endless flow of baseball stats with advanced analytics to build a highly competitive team on a small budget. Its 2002 payroll was only $44 million, and yet it was able to find hidden talent and compete with teams like the Yankees, which spent over $125 million on the "best" players that year. The Oakland A's did more with less and changed the way Major League Baseball does business by stepping away from traditional baseball wisdom. They "Moneyballed" the game. And now you can do same-you can Moneyball LD-by tapping into the endless stream of data flowing through your organization. It'll revolutionize how you develop the Roberto Clementes of leadership.1

To start this digital revolution, let's first explore what research and practice already knows.

• WE KNOW THAT ALIGNING NEEDS WITH LD OFFERINGS MAKES ORGANIZATIONS ROBUST AND SUSTAINABLE. Getting LD right is the foundation for healthy growth while getting it wrong creates a downward spiral of bad leaders creating bad leadership processes selecting for worse leaders and worse leadership processes. It's similar to making copies of copies and losing resolution over time. This is why practitioners and researchers in the know place so much importance on LD, and why it's a fast-growing market with an estimated value over $350 billion. As organizations have become aware of how critical LD is to their success, they have loosened their purse strings, and providers have rushed in to help. This dynamic sets the stage for a market filled with innovative products and services for taking your LD skills to the next level (provided you choose the right tools).2
• WE KNOW THERE'S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DEVELOPING LEADERS AND DEVELOPING LEADERSHIP. One aspect of LD to consider when shopping around for products and services relates to the difference between a leader as a person and leadership as a process. Whereas LEADER development focuses on boosting individual-level traits such as empathy and confidence, LEADERSHIP development focuses on developing group-level competencies for overcoming challenges and capitalizing on opportunity. For example, your group might need tools for developing shared leadership processes to empower employees and boost cross-functional performance.3
• WE KNOW LD NEEDS TO BE HABITUAL. Another defining aspect of LD is the importance of investing in continual improvement. Consider the difference between going to the gym once a week versus making it a habit. Go once a week, and you might get sore, but you won't get stronger. But if you regularly work out, and you pursue new exercises and learn how to focus on different muscle groups, you'll get stronger and more agile. The same is true for LD; you have to make LD habitual if you want to increase your effectiveness.
• WE KNOW LD TOOLS NEED TO BE JUDGED ON THEIR ABILITY TO INFLUENCE SPECIFIC OUTCOMES. Effective tools should work to drive the organization's strategy. For example, they should develop a strong pipeline for high potentials to rise and add continued value, and they should work to enhance critical factors such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). LD applications should also focus on real, practical challenges, develop the whole person not just specific competencies, and uncover a deeper, service-oriented meaning to leadership.4
• WE KNOW LD IS A SYSTEMIC PRIORITY. The data shows that most people are worried about leadership's ability to adapt and perform under pressure, especially during these uncertain times. Here are some compelling insights regarding the scope of concern:
  • LEADERS ARE CONCERNED. Korn Ferry conducted a survey of almost 7,500 senior leaders and found that only 17% were confident they had the necessary capabilities to achieve their organizations' strategic priorities.
  • EMPLOYEES ARE CONCERNED. A global survey of 4,000 employees conducted by Gartner found that only 50% were confident in their leaders' ability to create an inspiring vision of the future.
  • EXTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS ARE CONCERNED. Findings from the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer-a survey of over 36,000 respondents across 28 countries-found that CEOs are expected to develop skills to "shape conversation and policy on jobs and the economy (76%), wage inequity (73%), technology and automation (74%) and global warming and climate change (68%)."
• Leadership, in other words, is mandated to deliver on all aspects of business and society, but most stakeholders-including leaders-are worried that LD hasn't kept pace with situational demands.5,6,7
• WE KNOW THERE'S A LARGE GAP BETWEEN WHAT LEADERS SHOULD DEVELOP AND WHAT'S TYPICALLY ON OFFER IN THE LD MARKET. Experiential learning, for example, is a core theme in LD. Practitioners have advanced guided methods of learning through experience for decades. Yes, of course, a structured experiential approach is an important aspect of LD. Having opportunities to engage in concrete experiences and then learning how to reflect and apply this experience across a broader range of scenarios strengthens autonomy, confidence, and ultimately effectiveness. However, emerging research suggests that experiential learning can also lead to overconfidence stemming from excessive attention and praise, unnecessary conflict between those chosen for such LD initiatives and those left out of the loop, and emotional exhaustion-a "too much of a good thing" effect-where participants are simply overtrained. In practice, though this experiential concept feels right, research is telling a much more nuanced story where practical training for a select few can lead to toxic outcomes overall. Certain leaders may feel more confident, but the overall leadership system is not well prepared for challenges and opportunities.8

What We Don't Know about Leadership Development

This LD gap is problematic because it leads to blind spots in our understanding. Cultivating talent over time, for instance, is often imprecise and prone to failure. The following are four of these blind spots holding up much-needed improvements to LD.9

• THE SCHOLAR-PRACTITIONER BLIND SPOT: Whereas the practice side of LD traditionally relies on intuitive, well-packaged ideas, scientists traditionally rely on simplified analytical models that allow for a deep but not always practical understanding of LD. Leadership scholars know that experiential learning has its limitations, for example, but they don't typically have the practical experience to devise better alternatives. This divide between scholars and practitioners makes it difficult to create useful and scientifically valid tools.10
• THE TEMPORAL BLIND SPOT: Leaders are working with LD products and services lacking sufficient power to improve leaders and leadership over time. This temporal neglect is like going to a gym without a plan of action. You're not sure what to work on, how to work on it, or when to work on it. The results-like at the gym-are bad habits such as engaging in useless exercises, not keeping a schedule, and the potential for long-term injury.
• You'll likely struggle to effectively develop talent...