Today’s array of conferences and group seminars dedicated to leadership skills – in many ways a response to a lack of experienced development practitioners – means that long-term, one-to-one coaching, in which a trainer guides an executive towards his or her personal performance targets, is increasingly rare. Kevin Lane Turner, President of Turner Leadership Strategies (TLS) outlines why such tailored training provides better results – and value – for companies and their heads.

As an executive coach, how would you describe your profession?

We develop executive talent for large, medium and small businesses.

Today we find ourselves at a similar place as Marvin Bower, the father of management consulting and head of McKinsey & Company, faced in the 1930s. The “profession” of Executive Development is in great need of qualified coach-practitioners. There are a lot of people out there who identify themselves as executive “coaches” or “trainers.” However, it is difficult for companies to find skilled development professionals who have the ability to lead an executive through a sustainable change from point “A” to point “B” with their behavioral habits. This requires skill, experience, logical thinking, and intuition on the part of the coach in order to produce the sustainable results demanded for executive performance within today’s global economy.

Is there a particular method of leadership development that works better than others?

Yes. Executive Development is at a crossroads. Today’s system of leadership training and coaching is broken. Because of a shortage in skilled practitioners, motivational events and seminars, are being used as surrogate vehicles for individual executive training and development. Consequently, companies large and small are misappropriating critical resources (money, time, and people) to the tune of over $70 billion dollars per year in the USA and $130 billion worldwide.  When it comes to sustainable, human performance change and results required for today’s growing companies, motivational events and seminars have proven themselves to be ineffective and inefficient. Consequently, we set executives up for failure by not providing them the proper leadership training they need.  Then, when the executive does not measure up we blame them, not ourselves or the training vehicle we sent them to.

"Last year, Chief Executive Officer met with Kevin Lane Turner, president of the executive development firm Turner Leadership Strategies, to discuss the state of the leadership development industry. Now we catch up with him to hear his views on the current role of today’s corporate leader.

What are today’s stakeholders looking for in their senior executives?

Click here to read the rest of Kevin’s interview with CEO Magazine.