Leadership and leadership training

20250102.2

The British and US armies have entire programs designed around leadership and leadership training. Institutions like Sandhurst and West Point focus purely on leadership. Entire industries have been formed around providing executive managers with leadership training, and yet many employees still complain about leadership, management, and corporate politics.

So why is it that with all of this support and training, we still get things wrong? We believe that reviewing case studies, listening to management executives talk about concepts, filling in activity sheets, and sticking post-it notes on the wall is all that’s required to demonstrate leadership.

We have fallen into a trap where theater is a substitute for actual leadership. Confidence and charisma outweigh competency. All that’s needed is positive thinking, and you can trust that you’ll figure out a way through. We are led to believe that filling in frameworks and following processes is all that stands between you and success.

The first thing to recognize is that these worksheets and the management professionals who like to conduct this training are not without value, but they are case studies; they are reference points. Attending a workshop is very different from actually practicing the lessons taught in the workshop. Regularly enforcing and practicing those lessons is very different from simply experimenting with them occasionally. There’s a difference between reading a book and living the stories.

Leadership workshops are a summary—a distillation of key knowledge into usable, intangible actions. But just like reading the Bible doesn’t make you a Christian, attending a workshop doesn’t make you a leader.

So whilst these lessons are important and useful, what actually needs to happen for leadership to elicit change is organizational change in the way that we do things and the way that we conduct ourselves.

Leadership training is on-the-job training; it’s an apprenticeship. If you want to train to be a leader, you need to be in an environment where you’re allowed to lead. You need to be in an environment where you are able to effectively analyze problems, make decisions, and have enough resources to make change and enough freedom to make mistakes. If you have the right environment, then some of these frameworks that are taught can be implemented. Once you start to implement these frameworks, you need to have a system to analyze the results, monitor progress, and get feedback so that you can adjust goals and iterate. Ideally, you also want to have mentors who can advise you and help you think about how to improve. Ideally, you want to have a system in place that allows you to get feedback from those that you were trying to help so that you have both quantitative and qualitative signals that you are achieving your aim.

Leadership isn’t about worksheets and filling in activities. It’s not about doing workshops and feeling good with theater. Leadership is about making decisions, adjusting your strategy, and improving the plan over time. Leadership is about taking ownership and being accountable both to those that report to you and to those that you report to. It is about being personally responsible for the outcome of your decisions. These are not things that you learn in a workshop. These are fundamental character traits that are developed over years of work.

I found this article in particular quite compelling on the subject. https://time.com/7022677/mediocre-leadership-essay/