In this talk, the speaker argues that conventional leadership development—characterized by one‑off workshops, standardized models, and quick‑fix “McLeadership” programs—is fundamentally flawed for today’s fast‑paced, distributed, and complex work environments. She describes the phenomenon of “McLoops,” where energized teams revert to old habits shortly after a retreat, perpetuating a cycle of repeated trainings that never create lasting change. The root cause is traced to five pervasive myths: (1) information alone creates transformation, (2) changing behavior alone changes outcomes, (3) problem‑solving equals progress, (4) standardization yields excellence, and (5) training equals development. These myths treat organizations as predictable machines rather than living social systems. As an alternative, she proposes a developmental, holistic approach called “Development All,” which focuses on continuous, inside‑out growth of the whole person at every level of the organization. This approach emphasizes deep thinking, mindset change, and ongoing capability building rather than surface‑level behavior tweaks. The talk ends with a reflective call to leaders to assess whether their culture is stuck in the McLeadership cycle or truly committed to meaningful, long‑term development.
Chapters
You know, if you're in any kind of leadership role today, you know the pressure is just relentless. But what if I told you that the standard playbook we all use, you know, the workshops, the models, the best practices, what if that's actually part of the problem? Today we're gonna dig into why that might just be the case and what a better path forward could look like. Right now, we are all operating in what you could call the whiplash world. I mean, everything is faster. Our teams are spread out all over the place, and the mental load on leaders is just immense. We expect them to be a coach, a strategist, and a crisis manager, often all in the same afternoon, but without the deep-seated skills to actually handle all that complexity. So, to cope with all this pressure, a lot of organizations have turned to a solution that feels really familiar, and that's "McLeadership." It's basically the fast-food approach to development. Think about it—those one-off workshops and standardized models. They're quick, they're easy to scale, and they give you this temporary feeling that you're doing something. But just like fast food, they leave you feeling unsatisfied because there's no real long-term nourishment there. And this really gets to the heart of it. A training session, sure, it might create this little burst of excitement, a moment of momentum, but it almost never builds the deep internal capabilities that leaders really need to navigate the constant chaos of this whiplash world. Okay, so what are the actual consequences of relying on this fast food model? Let's break down what the McLeadership Problem really looks like in practice. Well, it leads to this incredibly frustrating cycle called McLoops. You know the drill: a team gets totally energized at a retreat. They're buzzing with new ideas. But as soon as they get back to the daily grind, that buzz just fades and the old habits creep right back in. And before you know it, you're scheduling another workshop to fix the very same problems, starting that loop all over again. Seriously, does this sound familiar to you? I mean, have you ever left a workshop feeling completely inspired, only to watch that energy just fizzle out a few weeks later? It's an incredibly common experience, and it's a direct result of this whole MIC Leadership approach. Now, this isn't happening because people aren't trying or because they have bad intentions. The real problem is that these MIC Loops are fueled by a set of really outdated ideas—these foundational myths about how people actually learn and grow. Turns out our whole conventional approach to leadership development is built on 5 core myths. These are assumptions that, you know, they seem logical on the surface, but they just fall completely flat in today's world. So Myth Number 1 is the idea that information creates transformation. We have this belief that if we just give people more knowledge, a new model, more data, their habits will magically change. But come on, we've all experienced that gap between knowing you should do something and actually doing it. Real change takes so much more than a new slide deck. Next up is the myth that if you just change the behavior, you'll change the outcome. This leads to this obsession with checklists and competencies, trying to manage what people do from the outside in. But it totally ignores the deeper mindset that's driving those actions in the first place. It's like putting a Band-Aid on a broken arm. And myth number 3: Problem solving creates progress. This way of thinking puts leaders in a constant state of reaction, always just putting out fires. And yeah, it feels productive, but real progress isn't about fixing what's broken. It's about building the capacity capacity to create something totally new and better. Then we've got the myth that standardization produces excellence. This is the classic one-size-fits-all model. We roll out this uniform leadership program and just expect it to work for every single unique person, team, and situation. It completely misses the fact that context is everything. And the final myth, which really ties this whole thing together, is the belief that training is development. We assume that sending someone to a workshop filled with tools and content automatically builds their capability. But true development is not one-time event. It's a continuous, ongoing process of growth. So if these myths are so obviously flawed, why are they everywhere? Why do we keep falling back on these same old approaches again and again? Well, the reason they stick around is because they're not totally wrong. They're just incomplete truths. Each one has a little grain of truth in it, but their shared fundamental flaw is that they treat our organizations like predictable machines when the reality is they are complex, living, breathing social systems. Okay. So if we need to stop treating our organizations like machines, what's the alternative? If McLeadership is the problem, then the solution is an approach that's been called developmental. And the difference is just night and day. MEC leadership is all about one-off events and focusing on surface-level behavior with a one-size-fits-all model. The Development All approach, on the other hand, sees it as a continuous process. It goes way deeper to develop a person's thinking and focuses on the whole person, not just a narrow set of skills. What we're talking about here is a fundamental shift in perspective. Instead of just handing people external tools and templates, the focus is on growing a leader's capability from the inside out. It's about changing how people think, not just telling them what to do. And the name Development All actually has this really clever double meaning. First, it means we need to develop people at all levels of the organization, not just the senior executives. And second, it means we need to develop the whole person—their thinking patterns, their actions, and even their state of being. It's a truly holistic way of looking at growth. And what happens is, when you start to adopt this perspective, you begin to see leadership and your own role in it in a completely new light. It's a pretty transformative shift. In fact, a leader who went through this process captured the feeling perfectly. They said, "I cannot unsee what I now see." Because once you recognize the limits of MICK leadership and you really grasp what a true developmental alternative looks like, your whole perspective on growth is just permanently changed. You can't go back. And so that really leaves us with one final question to think about. I want you to take an honest look at your own organization's culture. Are you stuck in that cycle of Mick leadership, serving up quick-fix trainings that ultimately leave people hungry for something real? Or are you truly committed to the deeper, more meaningful work of actually developing your people? The answer to that question, well, it could change everything.
