Leadership Readiness Starts at the Top

This is where leadership readiness can start to become something tangible.

At this level, leadership development isn’t really about adding another model or framework. Most senior leaders have encountered plenty of those already. What is often more valuable is creating the space to step out of the day-to-day, look at how they are actually leading, and understand the effect they are having on the people and system around them.

Senior leaders obviously set strategy and make decisions, but they are also constantly sending signals through their behaviour. People notice how they respond when things get difficult, what they pay attention to, how they challenge each other, what they avoid, and what happens when there isn’t an obvious answer. Over time, those behaviours become part of how an organisation works.

This is one reason we believe leadership readiness needs to start at the top.

We’ve seen this in our work with senior leaders at IBM. In IGNITE, the senior leadership program for technology sales leaders, the work began by bringing leaders together in person and giving them the chance to step away from the immediate demands of their roles, build deeper human connection and explore the leadership behaviours their context demands.

But what happens in those two days is only part of the work. The more interesting question is what leaders do with it when they go back into the reality of their jobs.

That’s why the IGNITE journey continues through a series of leadership touchpoints designed around behavioural activation: noticing signals, exploring tensions, breaking through barriers, and consciously choosing different responses when leadership gets difficult.

This is where we’ve found development becomes useful. It might be noticing your instinctive reaction in a difficult situation and deciding to try something different. It might be having a conversation you would normally avoid, or becoming more curious about a barrier before trying to remove it. Sometimes it is simply having enough shared language with colleagues to talk differently about what is happening.

None of those things sounds particularly dramatic on its own. But when a group of senior leaders starts doing them consistently, individual development can begin to become organisational capability. The conversations change, different things get noticed, and different behaviours start to become possible.

We don’t know exactly what senior leadership will look like in five or ten years, but we can be fairly certain that complexity, uncertainty and change aren’t going away. Leaders will need to create clarity without pretending to have all the answers, stay grounded when there is pressure to react quickly, build trust while maintaining pace, and continue adapting their own behaviour as the context around them changes.

That kind of readiness doesn’t come simply from knowing more about leadership. It comes from having opportunities to practise it, reflect on it and learn alongside other people who are facing many of the same challenges.

And when that happens amongst the most senior leaders in an organisation, what changes rarely stays in the room.

Otto Ruijs, Head of Leadership Development Programs
Chris McGee, Sr. Leadership Trainer & Facilitator