A Better Way to Grow Leadership

Remember when you were learning to drive?

No matter the pre-work you did on Grand Theft Auto or YouTube, nothing taught you more than the physical act of being behind the wheel and experiencing driving a car. (With or without a terrified parent screaming at you to “PLEASE SLOW DOWN!!”)

As the well known philosopher of learning John Dewey said, 'Learning is doing'.

It’s the same for any complex skill - learning to scuba dive, manage a team or knit a sweater.? Theory and instruction are great, but immersion in doing is where the learning really happens. It bears emphasising that leadership training is not an end in itself; applying the training is the point.?

Fill 'em up!

If learning is doing, why then do traditional approaches to leadership development lean so heavily towards classroom-based learning? Leadership, by definition, is not a theoretical pursuit, so how has it ended up on the wrong side of so many wordy lessons? John Dewey called the idea of requiring learners to passively absorb material 'medieval'. Of course, that’s if team leaders are offered any training at all.?

The numbers vary, but between 50% and 60% of all first time managers receive no formal training (see surveys here or here). And that means nearly half of all leaders fail - or worse, flail - in their roles.

For those who do get training, the learning typically arrives as a big lump, in the form of a course. There are three instantly visible features of the typical training approach:

1. there is an outsized focus on content, which stems from the assumption that:
2. managers are (mostly) empty vessels who need to be filled with knowledge, which implies:
3. that knowledge acquisition alone is enough to become skilled in its application.

Which if that were true would mean we could all learn to drive by suffering a dad lecture and reading the Road Code.

Seen another way, it’s as if companies view learning as inoculation. One hot shot of dense material and then the manager is fired back into the workplace as a leader.

Good luck with that. It might work for disease, but it has got to be the single worse way of building skill one could imagine.??

Hot skills

To make things even more interesting the skills of team leadership that matter most - think of things that AI cannot do, like communication, psychological safety, direction setting, conflict management - are in hot, hot demand. A study of 82 million US job postings shows that seven out of the ten most requested abilities are soft skills.

Employers seek those skills four times more than technical skills.

The fill 'em up approach is ok for imparting theory but when the rubber hits the road digesting the real experience teaches you more than 100 courses.

Front line leaders are the corporate equivalent of professional athletes

While we are not advocating an end to classroom based learning (Dewey thought theory and practice work hand-in-hand) we do believe there is an opportunity at the leadership level to take a leaf out of the professional sports playbook.

Top athletic skills are carefully mapped out and players helped to review and process their experience of performing that skill. Act, review and then go do the skill over and over again to build deep competence.

That sounds like no leadership programme I know of. Yet ironically leadership research has shown the same approach works brilliantly.

Companies just don't do it.

Learning is doing. Here's how we are changing the game:

1. Provide brief instruction in well described leadership skills. Less theory, more how-to. Yes, sometimes that looks a little like a recipe (but why not? We have excellent methodologies for everything from goal setting to team building).
2. Have leaders complete what we term journeys: short, expertly-designed in-role activities that mark excellent leadership. For example, a journey could be to map team member hard and soft skills, and work through a series of 1-1's to better craft job fit. Or it could be to conduct a workshop with the team to clarify team purpose, mission and measures of success.
3. The journey has a number of elements designed to make it contextual, immersive, sensory and emotional. Learning works better when you can feel it.
4. Complete a journey after-action review with the team. This highlights what worked and what didn't, whether it's useful for team performance and wellbeing.
5. Review with a coach, or in a facilitated peer-learning group.

We are aware that in many leadership development events (called programmes, but not really programmatic) individuals or cohorts sometimes complete assignments. But in my experience and awareness they are for the most part make-work tasks more akin to projects.

"Leadership is not a destination; it's a journey. We never arrive. The process is ongoing. There's always something we can learn and improve on" John Maxwell

That is not what we advocate at all.

Human behaviours don't always change easily, and they don't shift overnight. We are avoiding one-off programmes in favour of at-scale skill building systems.

We think that the learning should be embedded in the daily work of a leader. Learning is doing ~ not a special project, but the everyday, gritty stuff that constitutes what leaders actually do. We plan for leaders to repeat lessons, journeys and reviews many times - because very few of us become expert on our first try and through repetition is how we all build competence. ?

In fact, why not let managers choose the skill maps and journeys they need right now? There's no reason leadership training has to occur on the L&D timetable at all. Learning when it's needed boosts motivation and enhances transfer to the workplace.??

Start your engines, and buckle up Dad.

If you like what you read here feel free to share.

And if you want to work with us on new approaches to training team leaders ~ get in touch.