Terry Patterson still remembers watching an engineer walk down a corridor at Ford.
The man was, in Patterson's words, "an absolutely brilliant automotive engineer," and that brilliance had carried him quickly through the ranks. It had not made him a good manager. He struggled to relate to the people who worked for him, and it was pointed out to him more than once, in settings Patterson describes as uncomfortable.
Patterson saw what followed as a colleague, from inside the company. The engineer did not go away to a program and come back different. He worked at the human side of leadership the way he had already worked at the technical side, deliberately and without letting it drop, and it compounded. Eventually he could walk the halls of his engineering building and greet every person by name, knowing something of their story and their family. Patterson, who watched it across eight to ten years, calls him "literally one of the best leaders that I had ever worked with."
The story is memorable because of the hallway. It is instructive because of what filled the time: not a program he attended, but a practice he kept.
The same rules at every scale
Patterson has seen leadership development from several vantage points: coaching leaders inside Ford and IBM as a senior HR executive, and for roughly fifteen years as a Managing Director in Human Capital Consulting at Deloitte, advising organizations of the same caliber. Today many of the executives he coaches run small and mid-sized businesses. One might expect the lessons not to travel. He finds the opposite. Leadership growth comes down to high performance, lifelong learning and continued career growth.
"Those three things apply no matter what type of organization that you work in."
If the fundamentals hold across industries and sizes, the variable that matters is execution: whether development actually reaches the work.
Where the investment leaks
Patterson values formal development. Training, leadership programs and executive MBAs are "really, really valuable interventions," and the right tool for specific skills and knowledge. The mistake is relying on them alone. They arrive infrequently, many people have no personal development plan they are continually working on, and learning fades before it meets a real decision.
"Ongoing, repetitive, week in, week out work with your manager, with your coach, with whoever it is, tends to have far more positive impact than occasional training programs." Combined with that ongoing work, he says, "that's when it becomes really powerful."