In their latest book, Leadership at Scale, McKinsey consultants Claudio Feser, Michael Rennie and Nicolai Chen Nielsen modestly refer to the firm as the premier leadership factory in the world.  Whilst confidence is clearly not something lacking at the company, it is nonetheless futile to deny their tremendous influence on the leadership profession today.

Central to their thesis on leadership is the ‘leadership at scale diamond’, which is a four-sided model that exists in a state of perpetual motion that sees each element adjusted continuously in response to conditions faced in real-time.

1. Critical shifts –The first side of the diamond implores organizations firstly to link their leadership development to the core goals of the organization, and then to focus on the 3-5 behaviors, skills and mindsets that will have the biggest impact on performance.
2. Organization-wide engagement – The second side then revolves around ensuring sufficient breadth, depth and pace is integrated into the project to change leadership behaviors across the organization, whilst giving all employees a clear understanding of what great leadership looks like.
3. Maximise behavior change – Ensure that all interventions are designed with a clear focus on helping individuals become better at their jobs, with the best and latest thinking from neuroscience used to help achieve this.
4. Integrate and measure – The final side of the diamond then aims to ensure that the broader ecosystem supports and reinforces these shifts in behavior, skills and mindsets so that the change becomes self-reinforcing.

The authors believe that these four principles form the basis of all leadership development efforts at McKinsey.  They’re designed to form an integrated system for leadership development.

“Our research and experience shows that all four principles must be present in order to increase the leadership effectiveness across an organization,” they say.  “Even if three of the four principles are adhered to, the leadership development impact is often severely compromised.”

ADP Research Institute’s Marcus Buckingham and Cisco’s Ashley Goodall have a slightly different perspective on leadership development. In their latest book, Nine Lies About Work, they take a more cynical view of leadership development efforts.

Leadership is nothing if not a personal thing, that we tend to know when we see it, but if you ask people to describe a leader, you often get various characteristics, such as inspirational, authentic, strategic and all that. Whatever characterizes leadership for us, it’s almost universal that we think having more of it is better than less.

Given the difficulties we have in defining what leadership is, and the huge variance in it actually emerging successfully, the authors question the vast sums spent on trying to develop it in staff. Of the various characteristics typically developed in these programs, it’s probably fair to say there isn’t a single leader in the world in possession of them all.

Of course, as the ‘world’s leadership factory’, this is probably not a view that McKinsey would ever subscribe to, but it does add a degree of nuance to just what leadership is, and how it can be developed.