Building Development Programs in Skeptical Organizations

In most organizations, the ground is salt-laced. A haunted graveyard, made barren by a few dozen, well intended, poorly executed, development initiatives that came before. Here, corporate memory skirts on the edge of photographic. If only that same memory could be applied to remembering to take ourselves off of mute on zoom calls.

Skepticism it turns out, is not the problem. It's a reasonable healthy immune system response to corporateese and empty promises. Your people aren't resistant to growth, they are resistant to the pageantry of growth. "This will bring new opportunities!" while never actually specifying what those opportunities are. Just that there will be some, somewhere, at some point.

Your people aren't resistant to growth, they are resistant to the pageantry of growth.

They have learned to recognize the familiar scent of yet another strategic planning initiative that will slowly wither and fade by the next quarter. Adopted by offering the posture of polite, yet surface level, compliance. Sure, they'll show up to the all-hands. They will click on option C: "sometimes," in the live poll, and ultimately be ready for not a whole lot to change.

Do you ever wonder where the charades come from?

Consider Marcus, a composite drawn from a dozen real-life directors I’ve worked with. He’s been with his company for coming up on twelve years. He is loyal, competent, strategic, and deeply suspicious of anything that reeks of a HR deviation from the primary mission. In a kickoff meeting for a new coaching skills program, he doesn’t cross his arms. Oh no, too smart for that.

Instead, he takes meticulous notes on a semi-fresh legal pad. His focus, absolute. He asks one or two incisive, yet specifically logistical questions that are of course impossible to answer fully in the moment. Then, he says, “Yeah, no, interesting. Very interesting. I look forward to seeing how it rolls out.”

What he's staging is a masterclass in institutional skepticism. His message is sent without a single negative word and is very clear: I have seen this show before. I know how it ends. Prove to me this time is different.

Marcus isn't your adversary. For better or worse, he is your most important audience. His buy-in, should you choose to accept it, is worth more than the cheerful enthusiasm of a dozen new hires. Earning it requires you to abandon the traditional playbook entirely.

The fundamental error of most development programs is that they begin by prescribing solutions. Entering the ecosystem with a preconceived notion of what works. That is... why they hired you, isn't it? For that extensive experience on your resume? You have the best practices, the agendas, an acronym-laden model, and proficiency in a suite of tools designed to fix a problem that we just know we're going to find. This approach triggers the very antibodies of skepticism you’re trying to avoid.

You already know the first step of discovery. A more effective, albeit slower, method is to begin with a process of an organizational diagnostic (sometimes this is called organizational analysis). This is not about sending another survey or an email with "just a few questions." It is a deeper, more qualitative data collection, and rooted in genuine curiosity. It takes letting go of the ego that encourages you to work primarily with the willing and eager leaders you have, and sitting down with the Marcuses of the world. Asking questions that more than likely, they don't know the answer to, or have a single right answer.

• What challenges is your team facing right now that's not as obvious to others?
• If your people weren't busy, where would they spend their time?
• How does the productive work get bogged down?
• What process gives you the biggest headache to follow?
• What was the last change that actually made things easier for you?
• And so on...

The common oversight here is the same reason you've been hearing other L&D pundits talk about dropping the needs analysis lately. Bill Hader, the actor, describes this phenomenon in screenwriting while working with a partner:

"When they tell you [what's] wrong, they're usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're wrong."

That means actual answers to the question themselves might also be less relevant than what you're listening for underneath. That also means you also may not be cleaning filling out a SWOT analysis on your slide deck this way. We should be replacing the "I am here to fix you" vibe, with the message of "I am here to understand you," and this is a critical distinction.¹

You're paying attention to relationship dynamics, who's opinion get defaulted to in meeting? Who's always roped into every project? Be on the lookout for conflict between what's said in private and what actions line up. Old narratives and explanations that live on like campfire ghost stories.

You can bet that whatever Marcus really believes about his situation or the business, the team they represent believes it too. Those types of convictions don't show up on a Likert scale if the real tell is how a leader avoids a question.

In practice, this looks like finding through a diagnostic that Sales believed Client Experience drove the business and collectively feels frustrated around decision making authority. Client Experience, meanwhile, believes Sales drove the business, and carried the same frustrations about how decisions are made. Mirror images of each other's resentment, while not realizing it was a corporate version of the spiderman pointing meme.

Not a training problem, and not quite a straightforward leadership problem when you uncover systemic belief structures. You've probably guessed by now that coaching skills would not quite cut it. That is the real pivot point of your solution. Gathering ground-truth intelligence from the people closest to the work, to mapping the specific, unique terroir of the organization over importing a prepackaged curriculum.

L&D traditionally loses traction when presenting back these issues. Decision makers look at this nebulous pain cloud of a problem, and then back to a tangible workshop series, and figure that running the training is at least something right now we can do. That's the mentality that puts us right back to the start. Go directly to siloed department jail. Do not stop at go, do not collect $200.

Getting Marcus to even approach a conversation about systemic issues is worth more than getting him hyped about a training plan. Because the thing that looked like resistance was the most honest signal in the room. The practitioners who learn to read it that way are the ones who earn the credibility to do work that actually changes something.

The thing that looked like resistance was the most honest signal in the room.

You can't start building credibility without a next step, otherwise your diagnostic just becomes a really good venting tour. We have to paint a path forward, even if you are being asked to continue with a development initiative. The math has to be simple, in your decision makers' or stakeholder's language. The cost of not addressing the real issue is higher than the cost of ignoring it.

The skepticism doesn't vanish overnight with a single, grand architectural gesture of a solution. But you can starve it of oxygen. Starve it by replacing the empty calories of corporate lingo with something useful: practical, specific engagements that meet your leaders, and their people, inside the problems they already know they have.

¹The concept of entering a system as a learner rather than an expert is a core tenet of Org Dev OG's like Edgar Schein, who called the diagnostic step "process consultation." The primary outcome here is intended to help the organization holistically observe and improve its own workflows or procedures. Essentially becoming the template by which internal consultants inside an org are modeled after. ICF Coaches, and HR/People folks should feel right at home here by treating your client or customer as the SME. The long-term goal being building resilience through the organization's capability to diagnose and solve its own problems.