HR and L&D leaders
Should we build our own leadership framework or adopt an existing one?
Adopt an existing one, adapt it to your context, and invest the saved time in making it stick. Most organisations that build their own framework produce something that looks distinctive and functions generically — because the work of building the framework becomes the project, and the harder work of embedding it in daily management behaviour gets less attention than it deserves.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: All five practices
The real problem is almost never the framework itself
Organisations with weak leadership cultures almost always have a framework already — values on the wall, a set of principles on the intranet, a leadership model from three years ago. The problem is never the content. It’s the consistency of application. A well-designed existing framework, consistently applied, beats a custom one gathering dust on the intranet.
What you should customise
Language matters. If “Clear the Way” doesn’t resonate in your organisation’s vocabulary, rename it. If the examples used in discussion sessions don’t reflect your industry or context, replace them. The principles can stay; the expression should be yours. That’s a different project from designing a framework from scratch, and it produces a better result for the investment.
Where a custom framework makes sense
If your organisation operates in a genuinely distinctive context — a specific regulatory environment, a cultural setting with particular norms, a way of working that’s meaningfully different from most organisations — a custom framework may be worth the investment. Most organisations don’t meet that bar.
Before you build something new, can you say clearly why your existing framework isn’t working — and whether that’s a design problem or an implementation problem?
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