An In Good Company podcast episode with Mike Kennedy, a learning and leadership development executive with experience at global brands including IPG, the NBA, and Tiffany & Co.
Listen now to discover what most leadership development programmes get wrong – and how to apply the stop, start, continue model to your leadership practice.
What is leadership – and what is it not? Is it about authority or influence? Having all the answers, or asking the right questions? In this episode, Mike Kennedy shares insights from 30 years in learning and development, reframing leadership as evidenced backed action rather than identity or set of traits. Through the lens of stop, start, continue, Mike challenges common myths and offers practical advice for leaders navigating constant change.
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Mike Kennedy joins Dan to share his wealth of experience from IPG Media Brands, the NBA and beyond to discuss what makes leadership effective today. Expect thought-provoking ideas on leadership myths, programme design pitfalls and the behaviours that drive real innovation, collaboration and motivation.
Here’s what you’ll hear:
- Why leadership is about what you do – not who you are
- The biggest pitfall in leadership programme design
- How to strengthen global team alignment and collaboration
- Why reflection is the cornerstone of good learning design
- The role of psychological safety in driving innovation
Watch the full episode here:
Stop, start, continue: a practical lens for leadership
Mike frames the conversation around a simple but powerful tool: stop, start, continue.
- Stop outdated myths and practices that hold people back
- Start behaviours that spark motivation and collaboration
- Continue timeless habits that anchor effective learning, and great leadership
Throughout the episode, Mike shares examples of what leaders should stop doing (ignoring the dynamic quality of leadership), what they should start doing (designing programmes that impact real business needs), and what they should continue reinforcing (reflection as a cornerstone of learning).
What should we stop believing about leadership?
Pretty early on, I realised that the question of whether leaders are born or made was the wrong question. Whichever one you choose, you’re still implying that being a leader is about who you are rather than what you do. That it’s based on traits, rather than behaviour and that you can point to what good leadership is as if it didn’t depend on the situation that you’re in, or the needs of the people you’re leading. Leadership is hard because it’s dynamic. You’re always earning permission to lead, and what earns you that permission just can’t be predicted in every situation. Leadership is, first and foremost, always about increasing the odds that you’ll behave in ways that meet the needs of the people you lead.
Where should we start when designing leadership programmes to avoid the biggest pitfalls?
About $100 billion is spent worldwide on leadership development, and so much of it is done without a concrete measurement plan. We need to start with the end in mind: what outcomes are we trying to achieve, and how will we measure them? So often there’s a disconnect - we say we’ll ‘make people better leaders’ without doing the needs analysis to understand what that ‘leadership’ will do for us. If the organisation finds that teaching people to juggle will help us be more profitable, then our job is to teach people to juggle – and measure how well we did it. But historically, we’ve fallen into the trap of ambiguity instead of starting with the end in mind. And that end has to be connected to the context of the business, to the things we’re trying to achieve.
What must we continue to embed in learning design?
We don’t learn by doing, that’s a little bit of a myth as well. We learn by doing and then reflecting on it. If I watch a YouTube video to change a tyre, I can do it. But unless I think about it later, I’m no more equipped to change a tyre without the video than I was before. The reflection piece is enormous, and it comes back to whether you are setting the context for why you want people to behave differently. Leadership development is always going to be about behaving differently, not just being different. And part of the reflection is making sure that we step back, think about the context and visualize ourselves doing the thing that we're doing. Our obligation as learning practitioners is to support design decisions with learning science, to give people tools to reflect in a guided way so they can apply learning in their context and practice, and to protect that reflection time so as to not rush people through it. Years ago, I built a rubric for my team: nothing we create should deviate from five principles – spaced repetition, retrieval practice, social learning, reinforcement and problem solving. But underpinning all of those is reflection.
Bonus insight: What drives innovation across organisations?
Expertise matters. We hate to fail, so promoting failure gets a lot of clicks. But in the real world there are guard rails that need to be present. Research suggests we learn from failures, but not our own, we learn from the failures of others. So, in terms of companies that innovate, they do have cultures of psychological safety where people feel empowered to try things, but don’t go all the way to celebrating every failure and just throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. That’s actually not a great recipe for innovation. Undergirding it with strong expertise and then letting the ideas flow from there is more productive.
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