No one cares about your framework – they care about leadership problems

This article was the topic of a recent live event, hosted by the author. Watch and listen, here.

A few years ago for Christmas, my dad gave me a beautiful antique atlas. It’s oversized and hardbound. This is the kind of book that covers the whole coffee table when it’s open yet still requires a magnifying glass to read the names of towns. My dad gave it to us “because you all travel so much.” While the atlas is lovely and we treasure it…its permanent home is on a bookshelf out of reach of my young kids. It’s certainly not the tool we turn to when we need to figure out how to get to the closest grocery store from our hotel while we’re on a family vacation. Why? Because it’s so robust, so exhaustive, that while it has the right information, it’s not packaged in a way that actually helps me navigate.

The same can be said about leadership frameworks.

In my role leading our Partner Success & Services team at Big Think+, I’ve seen a lot of leadership frameworks. A lot of leadership frameworks. These frameworks usually reflect the personality and culture of the organizations they come from – some are quirky, fun, and exciting; others are refined, formal, and focused on maintaining a beautiful legacy. But across all these leadership frameworks, I’ve noticed a pattern: they’re not enough to move learners to action. Often they’re not even enough to get learners to click!

The learner engagement problem

Consider a learning manager who spends months aligning stakeholders on a beautiful leadership framework. Next, she works with her instructional designers to translate each tier of the framework into a digital learning experience for mid-level managers. She hits publish on the first module:

“Competency 1: Delegation & Empowerment.”

She hits ‘send’ and the program kickoff email goes out to 150 managers. Six months later, she pulls the analytics report, dismayed. Even with an email nudge campaign and executive sponsorship, fewer than 20% of mid-level managers ever started the module, and program completion plateaued at 12%.

Why? Because no mid-level managers wake up thinking about “improving their mastery of the delegation competency.” They woke up thinking “I worked until 7 PM yesterday finishing something someone else should own – but no one on my team is ready to take this on, and I’m not sure how to get them there.” While the module might perfectly address the skills those managers need, they won’t recognize a solution if it doesn’t speak to their immediate problem.

First: Identify your problems

Before you can consider a problems-centered approach, you have to know what your leaders’ real problems are – and how they layer onto your leadership principles or competencies. These problems could be gathered through engagement surveys, listening tours, or even your LMS data – what learners are already searching for on their own. A good first step is to look at third party research reports from organizations like Gallup, as these macro trends are often relatable inside our organizations.

Next, you’ll need to theme and prioritize these problems, ensuring that you’ve identified a set that is specific enough that a leader thinks ‘yes, that’s me today,’ but broad enough that leaders across the company would recognize themselves in it.

Then it’s time to dig in and use these problems to help your leaders find your programs.

Swapping frameworks for problems

Just like that atlas my dad gave me, leadership frameworks aren’t great tools for helping your leaders navigate problems in-the-moment. They’re excellent tools for describing behaviors, for grouping skills, and for charting culture growth over time. They’re great for securing stakeholder buy-in and getting executives aligned on a vision for leadership across the organization.

You cannot sustain a learning program without executive sponsorship, and executives often think in models. But how do we take the information in those models and use them to create leadership programs that, like a modern GPS, portray the learner as the main character, solving relevant problems turn by turn?

Let’s take a “good, better, best” approach.

• Good: Use real leadership problems for titling and marketing your programs internally.
• Better: Don’t stop at the title. Design your leadership programs around discrete problems of practice leaders face every day.
• Best: Connect problems to frameworks through measurement, so you can communicate behavior outcomes in the language of your framework.

Good: Problem-first packaging

If you’ve already launched a leadership development program and you’re having an engagement problem like the one above, consider changing your approach to titling and internal marketing. Look at the differences between the way a learning manager might package her leadership program modules:

• “Competency 1: Delegation & Empowerment for Managers” → “Problem 1: I’m drowning in work that only I know how to do.”
• “Competency 2: Ownership & Accountability for Managers” → “Problem 2: My direct report doesn’t start or follow through without me reminding them.”
• “Competency 3: Vision & Strategy for Managers” → “Problem 3: How do I help my team feel invested in the work they do?”

In the above examples, problem-first packaging means being intentionally specific, rather than exhaustive and conceptual. This requires knowing what the biggest, persistent leadership problems are in your organization, and using those problems as the starting place for learning. Even if your existing learning programs cover more than just one problem, a narrow, problem-first title can create a more inviting entrypoint for your learners.

Better: Problem-first program design

If you’ve got a solid leadership framework and you’re beginning program design, consider breaking your program into shorter problem-focused sprints. Consider the examples below:

Framework Approach

• “Competency 1: Delegation & Empowerment for Managers” (1 hour to complete)
• “Competency 2: Ownership & Accountability for Managers” (1 hour to complete)

Problem Approach

I need a team that can execute without me.

• Introduction: You’re right, delegating is not always easy. (5 minutes to complete)
• Problem 1: Which tasks should I delegate? (15 minutes to complete)
• Problem 2: Doing it myself feels easier and faster than delegating. (20 minutes to complete)
• Problem 3: I don’t want to micromanage, but things fall apart if I don’t. (20 minutes to complete)

I need a team that owns their outcomes.

• Introduction: Why aren’t my team members stepping up? (5 minutes to complete)
• Problem 1: My team members keep asking for permission on things they should decide. (15 minutes to complete)
• Problem 2: My direct report places blame instead of owning mistakes. (15 minutes to complete)
• Problem 3: I want them to step up, but they seem happier waiting for direction. (15 minutes to complete)
• Problem 4: Holding people accountable feels awkward. (10 minutes to complete)

Breaking a larger sequential program module into shorter, discrete pieces does a few things. First, it helps you focus the learning experiences on something targeted and concrete. Second, it helps learners build momentum and a sense of accomplishment by completing more small things rather than investing lots of time and still seeing an “in progress” badge. Finally, it gives learners optionality; they can start with their biggest problem rather than following a sequence that may feel arbitrary. This sense of agency is key to motivation in adult learning theory.

Best: Measure with problems, report with frameworks

Problem-first packaging gets learners to click in; problem-first design keeps learners engaged. But to sustain executive sponsorship and to actually know if your programs are worth repeating, you need to close the loop: measure and report outcomes in ways that communicate across audiences.

What this looks like: paired pre/post questions that focus on a problem but align to a competency.

• Delegation → What percentage of your time goes to work you could delegate? (slider 0-100%)
• Accountability → What percentage of your time goes to following up on, finishing, or fixing work you’ve assigned to your team member(s)? (slider 0-100%)

A problem-focused measurement strategy is useful for three key reasons. First, like all behavior assessments, simple pre/post measures like the examples above help you track not just completion, but meaningful behavior and business outcomes. Furthermore, you can report these outcomes in ways that resonate with learners and with the executives that bought into your leadership framework in the first place. Problem-focused packaging and measurement allows you to report things like:

• The program met a real need; more than X% of managers finished one or more of the problem modules.
• Problem 2 seemed to be the most significant across the organization; that’s where more than Y% of managers started.
• Three months after the program ended, Z% of participants report spending less time spent on work they could be delegating compared with before they started, which represents meaningful progress on Competency 1: Delegation & Empowerment.

Second, problem-focused measurement also motivates learners because you’re getting them to be honest about how their daily problems are impacting their work – and giving them a chance to show progress on outcomes they care about.

Finally, problem-focused measurement closes the feedback loop for program improvement. If “Problem 3: I don’t want to micromanage, but things fall apart if I don’t” has low completion and low behavior change compared to the other problems, you know it’s time to redesign that content or reframe that problem entirely because it doesn’t seem relevant to your learners’ real lives.

Why many teams won’t try this

Centering learner’s problems isn’t a new idea; most L&D leaders are empathetic by nature and care deeply about solving real problems. But L&D teams have a great reason for getting trapped in framework thinking: it’s safe! A framework-first approach is defensible. You can show the logic, connections to the values and research you did to map your competencies…it seems clean. And when no one clicks into the program, you can rationalize using familiar excuses: our leaders are busy.

A problem-first approach feels riskier because it is riskier. It’s messier. You’re naming real issues instead of abstracting them away. And as a result, you may find that the problem your leaders are wrestling with most doesn’t fit neatly into your tier structure. Or you may discover the actual issue isn’t a competency gap at all: it’s a tool problem, or policy, or information architecture.

That friction is uncomfortable, and yet it’s also our best chance to learn something real, partner cross-functionally, and impact behavior at scale. Plus, it’s a great way to connect with your organization’s leaders at every level, who want to feel heard, understood, and supported.

Conclusion

Your leadership framework isn’t going anywhere. It shouldn’t! But your learners aren’t looking for a comprehensive atlas; they’re trying to find the grocery store in a new town. Problem-first design requires disaggregating competencies, tiers, and pillars into real, everyday problems that leaders face. This can often feel like a step backwards from the work you and your team may have already done to build your framework in the first place. It also requires being honest when a problem your learners face doesn’t fit your framework, and curious enough to ask why.

Despite those risks, I encourage you to try – even with one experiment in re-titling one of your programs around a real problem of practice. You might be surprised by how much changes when you stop asking learners to care about competencies and start asking them to solve problems they’re already thinking about.

This article is featured on Big Think.