Executive Leadership Development

Banff Executive Leadership Inc. built two pillars of work. One was board governance. The other, recorded here, was the development of people who were already running organizations. This page is an archival record of that pillar, written after the practice ceased to trade. Nothing on it is on offer.

The distinction the practice was built on

Almost all leadership development is designed for people on the way up. It assumes a learner who is acquiring authority, who needs frameworks they have not met before, and who benefits from being told how a well-run organization behaves. That assumption is reasonable for supervisors, team leaders and middle managers, and there is a large and competent industry serving them.

It is the wrong assumption for the people this practice worked with. Its participants were vice presidents, general managers, deputy ministers and heads of organizations, together with the members of executive teams reporting directly to them. They already held the authority. They had already seen a great deal, run a great deal, and in many cases survived a great deal. Their development need was not acquisition. It was refinement, correction and re-energizing, applied to habits formed over twenty or thirty years and largely invisible to their owners.

That difference is not a matter of pitching the same content at a higher level. It changes the problem, the peer group and the format all at once.

Different problems

An emerging manager's hardest questions are usually about how to do something: how to delegate, how to run a difficult conversation, how to build a plan. A chief executive's hardest questions are rarely of that kind. They are about which of several defensible directions to commit to; how to hold a strategy steady while conditions move under it; what to do when the organization's stated values and its actual incentives point in opposite directions; and how to keep judgement intact when the information available is thin and the consequences are large. These are not skills gaps. They are problems of judgement under exposure, and they do not yield to instruction.

Different peer expectations

Senior executives are demanding learners, and the practice said so openly. They challenge, they question, and they sometimes have real difficulty letting go of perspectives that have served them well for a long time. They also will not tolerate a room in which they are the most experienced person present. The value of a senior programme lies substantially in the other participants: people of comparable seniority, from unrelated sectors, with no stake in each other's organizations, who can therefore be told the truth and can tell it back. Assembling that room is harder than writing the curriculum, and it is the part that cannot be faked.

Different formats

The practice's programmes were intensive rather than restful, and applied rather than academic. Sessions were built around live cases, simulation, structured comparison with peers, and personal assessment instruments designed to show an executive how their own practices read to the people around them. Faculty were themselves former or serving executives, or recognized specialists in a defined field, because a room of senior people will grant standing on evidence and not on billing. Alumni did not describe the programmes as restful. They described them as high-impact and career-affecting, which was the intent.

The streams of work

Five strands ran through the executive side of the practice over its working life.

• Enhancing executive leadership and strategy. The core stream. Systems and network thinking, strategic thinking and implementation, personal style and profile assessment, ethical leadership and social accountability, financial and risk management, and coaching others for improved performance, taught through live cases on genuinely complex strategic challenges.
• Collaborative leadership. Team leadership, empowerment, delegation and direction, accountability mechanisms including performance management, and the reframing of working relationships across full-time staff, contingent workers, alliances and partnerships. The underlying argument is developed at length in the restored article on the five dynamics of network leadership, which addresses the central difficulty: leading where authority is not hierarchical and cannot be assumed.
• Creativity and innovation leadership. Building the conditions in which new ideas survive contact with an organization, assessing an organization's actual innovation processes, and re-vitalizing the creative capacity of executives who have spent a decade optimizing. Sessions in this stream worked directly with practising artists, on the view that creative discipline is better shown than described.
• Working with government and expert government relations. Understanding government structures and processes, civil service and political, as distinct systems with distinct logics; who influences government and how; citizen and community trends; the shifting mandates of government, business and non-governmental organizations; and building a coherent government and public affairs strategy rather than a reactive one.
• Leading complex change. Change that is adaptive rather than technical, where the destination is not known at the outset and cannot be project-managed into existence, and where the leader's own behaviour is part of the system being changed.

Judgement rather than technique

What connects the five is a conviction that senior leadership is largely a matter of judgement, and that judgement improves through structured exposure rather than through instruction. It improves by being tested against peers who are equally experienced and differently situated, by being fed better information about its own effects, and by being practised on problems complex enough to punish a glib answer. That is why the programmes were built around assessment, comparison and live cases rather than lectures, and why they were pitched only at people already carrying the responsibility.

The archived catalogue of executive and governance offerings is recorded on the programmes page. The individual and team work that ran alongside the programmes is described under coaching, and the off-site strand under retreat facilitation. The practice's own published writing on all of this sits in the Leadership Acumen archive.

Readers looking for a broader literature on executive judgement and strategy will find the standing body of it at Harvard Business Review, which the practice's own articles cited repeatedly.