Not too long ago I wrote about how much I hate competency models, quoting a CEO who pointed out that applying a competency model to a cracked cultural foundation won’t work. The next week I posted a quote from John Kotter about the role of culture in leadership development.

This month in HBR there is an article that brings some of this together that talks about developing a “leadership brand.” In short, authors Ulrich and Smallwood argue that you need to connect your leadership development activities with the culture and daily operations of the organization.

At the root of this unfortunate problem is a persistent focus on developing the individual leader. HR and succession-planning teams tend to concentrate on finding and developing the ideal candidate, who they hope will raise corporate fortunes. In our experience, many firms rely on a competency model that identifies a set of generic traits—vision, direction, energy, and so on—and then try to find and build next-generation leaders that fit that model. [The authors actually showed reps from nine big companies the competencies that the companies said were “unique” to their company—but they hid the name of the companies. Of course, the reps couldn’t pick out their own “unique” competencies.] The conclusion was obvious: By focusing on the desirable traits of individual leaders, the firms ended up creating generic models. And vanilla competency models generate vanilla leadership.

And vanilla competency models are based on the assumption that leadership is all about developing individual leaders, and it’s not. Leadership is a system capacity. It involves individual leaders and people in positions of authority, but if you focus only on developing those people, you will probably not develop your overall capacity effectively (result: vanilla leadership).

Jamie Notter