SPARC Executive Development and Consulting · TPM Series · Piece Two
It Doesn’t Look Like a Program.
That’s the Point.
What institutions that build developmental cultures actually do, and why you almost never see it coming
Institutions that are deliberate about how they develop twenty-year-olds are often unreflective about how they develop the forty- and fifty-year-olds leading them.
Higher education presents a specific paradox for the work of developing leaders. The institutional mission is inherently developmental: students are supposed to grow, be challenged, emerge different from how they arrived. And yet shared governance makes top-down culture change nearly impossible, faculty culture can calcify into fixed-mindset norms, and the orientation toward student development rarely gets turned inward. Institutions that are deliberate about how they develop twenty-year-olds are often unreflective about how they develop the forty- and fifty-year-olds leading them. The pattern is not unique to higher education. It shows up in foundations, healthcare systems, and mission-driven organizations of every kind, anywhere the work centers on human capacity and judgment, where the quality of thinking among the people doing it determines what the institution actually produces. What varies is the language. What doesn’t vary is the pattern.
The irony is generative, if you name it. One of the early moves we make in a higher education partnership is to ask: what would it look like if this institution applied to its own leaders the same developmental philosophy it applies to its students?
The research on what comes next holds across contexts. Nick Petrie is direct: to evolve a culture, the most senior leaders must model it first, in private, in leadership team meetings, before it appears in public.1 The Center for Creative Leadership calls this creating headroom: when the executive team elevates its own developmental culture, it raises the ceiling for everyone else.2 In higher education, this means Presidents, Provosts, and Chief Human Resources Officers who are willing to be visible learners, not just sponsors of learning. Jennifer Garvey Berger describes what this looks like in practice: leaders who ask questions they do not know the answers to, who take multiple perspectives including the ones that bewilder them, who see and name the systems they are embedded in.3
When the foundational stage is taking hold, three things become visible, not as programs, but as changes in the texture of daily institutional life. How strengths show up: performance conversations shift from evaluative to developmental; people are asked what they’re best at, not only what needs fixing. How appreciation shows up: the standing question in leadership team meetings shifts from “what’s broken?” to “when have we been at our best, and what made that possible?”, not as a facilitation technique but as a persistent cultural orientation.4 And how reflection shows up: leaders narrate their own learning, including their uncertainty and mistakes, not as confession but as modeling.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey describe a category of organizations they call Deliberately Developmental: institutions where there is no separation between doing the work and developing as a person.5 The institutions that do this well don’t call it leader development. They call it how we work.
Consider what this looked like in one institution where the foundational shift took hold. Joe, a senior leader in his organization, had received a charged 360 report, the kind that surfaces the loudest detractors and discourages those with positive outlooks. The pattern in the feedback was unflattering: some described Joe as a hyperbolic exaggerator of problems, not to be trusted with the best interest of the organization, willing to blow things up to prove he is right. Others saw Joe as brilliant in argument but distant in relationship, talented in his field but exhausting to work alongside. Based on these results and a few choice interactions with him, his CEO Margaret was openly considering whether Joe could be the leader the role required. Joe came to coaching with a defensive frame and a track record of outworking, outanalyzing, and outarguing his way through every previous role.
A new developmental 360 was run, this one asking respondents to rate Joe on his leadership behaviors rather than on his task performance. Participation went up. More feedback came in. And Margaret’s assessment of him stood out as nearly the inverse of his peers’ and direct reports’. Joe’s peers and direct reports gave him more credit for relationship skills than he gave himself, and less concern about reactive behavior than he held for himself. Margaret gave him less credit for relationships and far higher concern for reactive behaviors than the rest of the data showed.
When the contrast was named in the work, what emerged was not a difference of facts. Margaret was operating from a deficit mindset, looking for what was wrong with Joe. His peers and direct reports were operating from a more developmental orientation, naming both the strengths Joe was bringing and the patterns that limited him.
Joe and Margaret were transformed in the process. As they both shifted from a deficit orientation to a growth orientation, slowly, with support, in private before in public, they forged a new relationship. Joe started to see relationship strengths in himself that others had been seeing all along. Margaret started to see potential she had not been able to see, and developed empathy for the fear underneath Joe’s protective patterns. The relationship between them moved. And the texture of how leadership was being assessed across the broader senior team moved with it. Senior people went first, in private, and were not snapped back by institutional expectations, but committed to a growth mindset.
Compare that to a different institution. A dean named Robert brought us in for what he framed as team building and leadership development. We ran four full days of strengths-based work over a six-month period with his entire 50-person team. The feedback suggested the team was hungry for it and appreciative of it. But underneath, we could feel something the activities were not reaching. As part of the package, six of the institutional leaders started one-on-one coaching, and over the following weeks they revealed, one by one in their own ways, that Robert was tyrannical, and that they doubted what we had set in motion would be allowed to take root once the workshops ended. The strengths orientation, the developmental questions, the appreciative framing, none of it would survive the daily reality of working for him. They were right to worry. The senior person had not gone first.
Then Robert left. The interim leaders engaged us for a second year of developmental work and doubled down on strengths, vertical leader development, and growth orientation. They also asked us to facilitate a restorative process to deepen the team’s commitment to moving forward from the past. We knew then. The work was going to stick. The institution was ready, because the senior people now leading it were the ones willing to go first.
Most foundational work doesn’t look like a program. There are exceptions worth naming, structural moments that map cleanly onto the principle. The clearest of these is the moment of arrival. When a senior leader starts in a new role, with a new team, one of the cleanest ways to go first is a facilitated new-leader integration process. The facilitator helps the new leader prepare a five-minute introduction for the team: who they are, what their leadership style is, what their preliminary vision might be. The leader delivers it, then leaves the room. The facilitator then works with the team alone, surfacing what the team needs the new leader to know about them, what they need to know about the leader, and how they want to work together. The leader’s absence is structural, not incidental. It allows the candor that the leader being present would foreclose. The facilitator then meets with the leader privately to work through everything the team surfaced, including the harder pieces. In the final session, everyone is back in the room, and the leader speaks first, responding to what the team named. The structure of the process maps directly onto the principle. The leader has gone first.
Berger’s case study of Suncorp’s Strategic Innovation division shows what happens further out, when the developmental culture has been embedded long enough to travel beyond the institution itself: the telling evidence came not from an employee survey but from a sixteen-year-old who noticed, unprompted, that his father had become more curious about him since joining the division.6 Development that sticks travels, sometimes across the senior team, sometimes home. For an institution whose mission is human flourishing, that is not a side effect. It is the point.
Before any programmatic work begins, we ask three questions of the senior team: Do your leaders know what they’re best at, and put it to use in service of the mission? What question does this institution most persistently ask about its people? And when did a senior leader last learn something in public? The answers tell us more about developmental readiness than any formal needs assessment.
None of these questions has a right answer in the abstract. An institution whose leaders cannot answer the first question is not a failed institution. It is an institution that hasn’t yet made strengths-based development a priority, which is common. An institution where the dominant question is “what’s broken?” is not pathological. It is operating on the reasonable assumption that problems require diagnosis, which most institutional cultures share. And most institutions will struggle with the third question. The last time a senior leader learned something in public, for many, is an uncomfortably long time ago.
What the questions surface is not deficiency. They surface the distance between where the institution is and where the foundational work begins. That distance shapes the sequencing: how long the ground floor stage needs to run before the architecture above it can bear weight, and what the senior team itself needs to do before it can credibly ask development of others. The senior team usually needs to go first. The institution follows what gets modeled at the top, not what gets written in the strategic plan.