Leadership development: the 45 degrees feedback system

There are two types of leadership development programmes that worry me: the adjustable and the prescriptive. The adjustable are represented by those that rely fundamentally on the 360 exercise by which the manager or leader asks others for their usually blinded feed back on a series of skills or abilities or behaviours. The feed back is received and all ends up in an exercise of adaptations: communication more please, empowerment more please, vision we are ok thanks, visibility we need more, micromanagement less, trust more etc. It is like refilling the shelves in a supermarket. For each 360 feed back system I know working well I can call 10 that are a box ticking exercise or in the worse of the cases one of a potentially dangerous outcome since it is used as a power exercise; Joe, there are some issues with you. You need a 360.
The other worrying type of leadership development is the prescriptive one. In this type there is an ideal norm of balance described as the five attributes or the six qualities. What is good and desirable has been crafted a priori sometimes almost with a religious flavour. Again, I have seen many box ticking built around this normative ideal.

I believe that we lack a third type that I would call reflective, in which what matters is to find the questions to ask, not the availability of beautiful ready made answers. The model I use which is the one behind my book The Leader with Seven Faces points to seven areas of questions for which we need to find answers: what we say as leaders or questions about language, where we go or questions about the journey as leaders, what we build or questions around what we leave behind, what we care about or questions about the values, how we do it or questions about what drive us, what we are or questions about responsibility and identity and finally what we do or questions about our behaviours. Somebody said that the real journey on personal development, and I would include leadership here, is not a long one to a Far Land for guru inspiration or a long method to achieve an ideal but a short one, a few inches journey down the skull. I respect the 360 degrees methodology but I prefer the 45 degrees which is about the angle required to look yourself in the mirror every day.