SPARC Executive Leadership Development · TPM Series · Piece One
Leader Development Didn't Stick.
Here's What Was Missing.
Why strengths, appreciative practice, and reflection have to come first — and why none of the three is sufficient alone.
Across higher education and large human capital organizations, the same story repeats: a well-designed initiative, glowing evaluations and nothing in the culture has changed. This is not a program design failure. It is a sequencing failure.
A vice provost at a mid-sized research university completed an eighteen-month leadership program two years ago. The program was well-designed. The facilitators were excellent. Their 360 feedback showed genuine movement — more listening, more openness, more willingness to be challenged. The evaluations were strong. They "returned" to their institutional role different, or at least differently aware. And within eighteen months, the people who worked with them noticed that they were, more or less, the same leader they had always been. The pressure of the culture, the pace of the demands, the ambient expectations of how a leader behaves exerted a gravitational pull that the program had not altered.
The investment was real. The change was not durable.
Nick Petrie calls this return to the organizational leader norm the culture bungee. Organizations have a center of gravity, a dominant orientation toward how problems are framed, how people are seen, and what questions get asked. When individual leaders grow beyond that center of gravity, the culture pulls them back. The more they stretch, the stronger the pull. Most leaders revert. The most developed leaders often leave.1
The bungee is real. But it is not fixed.
The bungee is one half of the reason these initiatives often fail at creating persistent change. Most organizational development initiatives are designed to improve how people lead: they teach frameworks, build skills, and transmit best practices about communication, delegation, and change. This work has genuine value. However, it operates on an assumption that the most effective leaders are essentially better-trained versions of average ones.
The most effective leaders are not, however, better-trained. They are different. They make sense of complexity differently, they hold uncertainty differently, they see themselves in relation to the people they lead differently. That difference is not a product of technique. It is a product of development — the development of the person — something the culture has to be ready to hold.
What makes a culture stretchable — what keeps the cord from snapping leaders back — is a specific foundation. Three interlocking conditions are necessary for leader development to take hold. We have come to think of them as three of the foundational cultural elements of our Transformational Partnership Model (TPM).
Three Foundational Cultural Elements
The First Cultural Element
A Strengths-Based Orientation
Thirty years of research — including Gallup's meta-analysis across 276 organizations in 54 industries — shows that when people understand and regularly operate from their natural patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving, they become measurably more engaged, more open, and more capable of growth.2 In organizations that emphasize strengths, deficits are managed and strengths are developed. The distinction matters enormously.
Strengths-focused cultures produce the safety needed for everyone — including leaders — to live in curiosity and examine their own assumptions. This is a prerequisite for vertical leader development.
The Second Cultural Element
An Appreciative Orientation
David Cooperrider's foundational insight — that organizations evolve in the direction of the questions they most persistently ask — is not an abstraction.3 It is an observable organizational phenomenon. When the dominant institutional question is "what's broken?", leaders learn to perform as problem-solvers. When the dominant question becomes "when are we at our best, and how do we build more of that?", something different becomes possible.
The culture shifts from diagnosis to creativity and innovation. That shift changes what kinds of conversations are safe, expected, and normal.
The Third Cultural Element
Reflective Practice
Petrie and colleagues at the Center for Creative Leadership identify reflection as one of the three primary conditions of vertical growth — alongside heat experiences and colliding perspectives.4 Without it, leaders accumulate experience without the deep learning and meaning-making that is the fuel of vertical leader development, and development stays horizontal.
Reflection is the mechanism through which heat and colliding perspectives deepen awareness and insight.
When all three cultural elements are working together, the culture begins to see development — growth — itself as the valued and regular path forward rather than remediation. A landmark peer-reviewed study by Canning and colleagues found that organizational growth mindset predicts cultural norms, employee trust, and commitment.5 Murphy's subsequent research, synthesized in Cultures of Growth, goes further: growth mindset cultures generate more innovation, collaboration, ethical behavior, and better long-term performance — and create environments where people at every level believe their potential is not predetermined.6
None of these cultural elements is sufficient alone. A strengths-aware leader in a problem-obsessed culture reverts. An appreciative culture without reflective individuals stays warm but shallow. Reflective individuals without psychological security can turn inward in ways that destabilize rather than develop.
Vertical growth requires vulnerability. Vulnerability requires safety. Safety is not a workshop outcome. It is a cultural property built over time — through these foundations and others — and is evident in whether the culture's dominant story about people is one of fixed limitation or of ongoing, developable potential.
TPM begins here — not with coaching programs, and not with vertical development curricula, but with the foundations of culture change.
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