Leadership Development - Leadership and the Sigmoid Curve

by Mark Evenden at Developing People

Charles Handy in his book the Empty Raincoat discussed a concept called the Sigmoid Curve, and its implications for organisations. In essence, Handy was explaining that all organisations have life cycles that are fairly predictable, and can be expressed in terms of S-shaped curves, like a product life cycle. The curves show how organisations form and start to grow, before eventually reaching a peak and starting to decline.

At Developing People, we believe that careers follow similar patterns. In the beginning of your career you learn a great deal, mature in your role, and then potentially move on if you feel you have either “outgrown” your role, or if you feel you have stagnated, got bored, and are just going through the motions of doing your job, with the consequential decline in performance.

What therefore are the implications of this for us as Leaders? One paradox is that leaders need to “re-invent” themselves before their leadership style becomes stale and less effective. Clearly this takes a certain amount of courage and foresight, because why should a leader change what they do when it is all working just fine, and they are successful?

Leaders therefore need to continually learn, develop and re-invent themselves if they are to be capable of continually challenging their organisations and leading them to greater performance.

The skills and behaviours that a leader has may have been successful in the past, but that is no guarantee that it will enable them to be successful in the future when they face organisational challenges and opportunities that they have not encountered before.

Marcel Proust once said “the real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes”. Leadership development programmes, leadership team development interventions and external coaching support can all help a leader to develop new perspectives and to see things with “new eyes”.

Would you like to challenge yourself as a leader, or would you like as an employee to see your company challenge its leaders in this way? Take a look at the Leadership Development page of the Developing People website for more information on what we can do to help.