Welcome to the Party. We Saved You a Seat

Recently I sat in on a DDI webinar about immersive leadership development. The idea was simple and sound. Leaders build real skill faster when they practice with real decisions, real pressure, and experiences that mirror reality. I smiled. Not because anyone said something wrong. Because they said something right, and I have been saying it since 1999.

In 1993, I began my doctoral work in leadership studies, and I looked at what was out there. My survey was informal, and I will not pretend it was scientific. But the pattern was hard to miss. Leadership development was almost entirely about charisma, traits, and great men and women, and it treated becoming a leader as inseparable from becoming a better human being. None of the programs I found connected to the real issues and challenges people faced every day. I could hardly believe it. That gap is what motivated me to solve it.

What I came away with was a simple distinction. There is a difference between being a leader and doing leadership. A person can sit through every program and still not know how to turn what they learned into action. Chris Argyris wrote a book called Knowledge for Action. I came to believe the arrow had to run the other way, from action to knowledge.

So, in 1999, I developed and published the LeadSimm method as part of my doctoral research at the University of San Diego. I built rooms where leaders worked through realistic scenarios drawn from their own work, and could make the call, live with the consequences, and make the next call a little wiser. Over more than 25 years, those rooms have run in more than 100 implementations across more than 50 cities.

From the beginning, I made one design choice that I still think matters most. I kept the challenges real, but I did not mirror anyone’s world. I invited them into someone else’s. The barriers I kept seeing in organizations were not skill gaps. They were distance. People who had never stood where their colleagues stand. So I built rooms where that distance disappeared, and I watched what happened next. Collaboration got easier. Influence replaced instruction. And empathy showed up without anyone having to teach it. I will keep the mechanism close, because the room works best when you walk in not knowing.

I want to be clear about something. I have long admired DDI’s research. Their Global Leadership Forecast is one of the few studies in this field that keeps its eye on what is actually happening to the workforce, and for the most part it names the real issues. I have leaned on that data in my own work. So when they made the case for immersive practice, I was not surprised, and I was not bothered. I was glad. People who read the workforce this carefully were bound to arrive here eventually, and the field is better for it.

Where I part ways with DDI is a matter of definition, and I offer it as a friend. Their forecasts have tracked the leadership bench since 2011, the pipeline of successors waiting for the positions above them, and they sort leaders by level, from the front line to the C-suite. It is a useful lens for succession planning. But it treats leadership as something that belongs to people in management roles, or the ones next in line. Their earlier surveys said so outright, defining a leader as someone who manages other people. I have never seen it that way. Leadership is influence, and influence does not wait for a title. In my rooms, a title never decides who leads.

Here is what twenty-five years in these rooms has taught me. Realism builds readiness, and readiness matters. But what changes a leader is something quieter. It is the moment a person makes a hard call, in a seat that is not their own, and discovers they can do it. That is personal agency, and it is what people are really searching for at work: a sense that they have some say, some control, some ability to move things. You cannot lecture that into anyone. You can only let them earn it.

So here is the good news. The industry is finally asking where leaders are made, and not only who is next in line. I plan to keep building the answer, one room at a time. Pull up a chair. We saved you a seat.

As always, I welcome your comments and am happy to respond. Feel free to share your thoughts below.