Treat Leadership Development Like an Engineering Problem
Your engineering executives define outcomes, study systems and isolate variables for a living.
Then we hand them this. Be more strategic. Delegate more. Work on your executive presence.
The feedback is accurate and useless.
Not because the leader resists it. The ones I work with want a specification and cannot get one.
Run the development work the way they run everything else and they engage.
Why be more strategic is accurate and unusable
The feedback is true. Your senior team has watched this person for years and formed a view. Something real is missing, which is what makes it so frustrating to receive.
The problem is the form it takes.
Be more strategic names a result. No baseline, no variable, no test. You cannot measure it on Tuesday or fail it on Friday.
Hand that brief to an engineer in a technical context and nobody starts work. Make the building perform better. Perform how? Under what load? Against what baseline?
Senior leaders get that quality of brief about themselves and are expected to act on it anyway.
So they guess. They talk more in meetings, or less. They stop asking questions because questions might read as uncertainty. Some of it helps. Most of it is motion, and next year's review says the same thing.
This is where the eighteen month problem starts. A leader described as almost ready for eighteen months is at risk. Not for lack of effort. A missed transition does not resolve on its own.
There is a harder version. Executive teams do not articulate why somebody is not ready. They stop discussing them.
Respected, and not considered. That leader has nothing to work with.
Engineers already know how to solve a problem like this
The method is already installed.
Engineers define outcomes, study systems, isolate variables, test, measure and iterate. They distrust conclusions that arrive without evidence. Nobody has to teach them any of this.
What creates resistance is the packaging. Vague goals. No baseline. Language borrowed from another profession. A workshop with no visible connection to next Tuesday.
Give the same person a defined problem and a way to check progress and they will outwork anyone in the building.
I describe readiness through two lenses because both are system descriptions rather than character assessments.
Leadership transitions: how the work changes as a leader scales.
Leadership signals: how readiness is experienced by everyone else.
A leader can move on one lens and not the other, and firms underestimate how often that happens. Real progress on the transitions, with no change in how the C-suite experiences the person, will not move a promotion decision.
Define the outcome, study the system, isolate the variables
Define the outcome first. Not grow as a leader. What does the next role require that this one does not?
Five transitions come up again and again.
Doing the work becomes owning outcomes you cannot produce yourself.
Delegating tasks becomes delegating responsibilities and the decisions attached to them.
Managing individuals becomes leading leaders who run large teams and major clients.
Fastest problem solver becomes the person deciding which problems get the firm's attention.
Protecting a region becomes building the firm.
Pick the one this leader has not made. Not ready covers all five equally badly.
Then study the system. The leader is one component. The manager, the peers, the direct reports, the sponsor and the room where readiness gets discussed are the rest of it.
Who concluded what, and on what evidence? What has to change in their experience before the conclusion changes? Is there a sponsor?
Firms skip this step. A leader can run a development plan perfectly and change nothing, because the people forming the judgment never saw any of it.
Then isolate the variables. Two or three. On the signals side the candidates are operating at the right altitude, starting with the answer, influencing laterally, credible confidence, and points on the board.
Translate each into behavior somebody else can watch.
Be more strategic becomes: open the next three executive meetings with a recommendation and the reasoning behind it, then hold the supporting analysis until somebody asks for it.
That has a baseline and a date.
What a coaching engagement looks like when it is run this way
Define the target role in writing. What it requires. Who agrees.
Gather evidence. A 360, stakeholder interviews, and a straight conversation with the manager about what the senior team concluded.
Give the leader the honest read. Most stalled leaders have never been told. It is uncomfortable and it is the highest-return thing a manager does.
Pick two or three variables and write them down.
Translate each into behavior a named person will be able to observe.
Practice inside real work. The next board meeting. The next pursuit. The next quarterly review. The next hard conversation with a direct report. A workshop will not produce this.
Set a ninety day standard with the people whose perception matters, then check it on the date.
One element sits outside the leader. Sponsorship compounds coaching. A manager who visibly backs someone accelerates everything. A coach cannot manufacture sponsorship that is not there, and any coach who says otherwise is selling.
For a CHRO this doubles as a standard you can hold any provider to. Ask what the outcome is, which variables they are working, what evidence supports them, and what progress looks like at ninety days.
No answers means you are buying hours.
Why hours are not the active ingredient
The research here is consistent.
Theeboom and colleagues found no relationship between the number of coaching sessions and effectiveness in 2014. Jones, Woods and Guillaume found the same in 2016. A 2023 meta-analysis tested both session count and total hours and found neither predicted outcomes.
Most coaching still gets bought by the package. Twelve sessions over six months. Sessions are the unit because sessions are easy to count.
If dose does not predict outcome, the weight sits on what gets worked and how precisely it is defined.
This is not an argument for short engagements. Behavior gets practiced inside real work and perception moves slowly.
Length is not the lever. Precision is.
Three well-chosen variables with an honest baseline will beat a longer engagement aimed at being more strategic.
This is also what gets a skeptical engineering executive to lean in. Most of them have watched development happen to somebody and change nothing, and concluded it does not work. They are not wrong about what they saw.
Ready to run this on one leader?
A strong technical leader described as almost ready does not need another program.
What that leader needs is a definition. What the next role requires beyond this one. Which two or three variables are in the way. What counts as progress in ninety days to the people who decide.
A short conversation sets that up for one succession-critical leader.
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