The farce of 'Conscious Leadership' Training

Farce - “a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay, typically including crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations.”

Never in the history since Industrialisation, has any “Conscious Leadership” training program been able to actually make senior executives/leaders conscious, conscious enough to alter their approaches towards different situations. And still companies spend millions of dollars across the globe in a hope to ‘make’ their executives - conscious leaders, through training programs spanning 2-3 days. Unfortunately in most cases, this is just a checklist to be ticked off by the Learning and Development/Human Resources vertical. It is even more sad in cases where the L&D/HR heads are genuinely hopeful of some visible improvement and change in their leaders.?

But in order to clearly understand why these programs are farce, we have to journey back to the times where cases of fraud were being committed on a massive scale across the world by CEOs and CXOs. The whole need to even have Conscious Leaders did not arise of the consciousness or the conscience of companies but only after these instances started severely impacting the financials and valuation of companies. The beginning of these programs, themselves prove that the whole objective of these programs was directly aimed towards working on the ethical integrity of these top executives.?

One of the key reasons these programs have negligible outcome, is because companies don’t really want ‘Conscious Leaders’, because truly conscious leaders will not choose profit maximisation over everything else. You could argue that the corporate scenarios have evolved and ‘profit maximisation’ is not really the primary objective of a business as is also taught to management students in business schools. But as soon as you start working with a company, you see this in every single thing a company does. The richer the board of directors of a company are, the lesser the resources they provide to their employees. I have personally observed this in most companies, where 10-20 people are sharing a common printer, and even after everything has become digital, a lot of documents are still required to be printed, either for compliance or for audit purposes. So imagine this, every time an employee needs a printout, they first send the command to the printer, go to the printer, wait for their turn, because other employees have also send a printout command, collect their printout and then go back to their seat only to repeat this process again in another hour or so. Any HR student will see the redundancy in this in terms of ‘work and motion’ study and it will be easy to calculate the amount that a company is actually losing out because of this. As the company expands, more and more focus is on ‘cost minimisation’ and ‘profit maximisation’, but a conscious leader in this case, would clearly see the futility of this and decide to get printers for every employee, realising that it will ultimately save money in the longer run, but companies don’t really want this.?

Every company in existence, inevitably reaches a point where they have to undertake unconscious decisions, in order to survive, and this is clearly visible in large tech companies, which are now annually laying off people in large numbers. Companies where almost all of the top executives have attended multiple ‘Conscious Leadership’ training programs, which have obviously failed them as individuals and the companies too. In most of these programs, top executives are taught about how to become ‘Conscious Leaders’ and given useless information about what a ‘Conscious Leader’ is and how she is supposed to be, 'through crude characterisation and ludicrously improbable situations', a better 'corporate' term for them would be ‘Case studies’. The sheer immaturity of expecting these executives to become ‘Conscious’ from a two-day training program at an expensive location with lavish facilities clearly tells you about how impactful these programs really are, and what is really expected by the companies-nothing. These programs become nothing but paid vacations for these executives who get a ‘sort of’ break from their monotonous routines, ‘sort of’ because they still have to be in touch with their CEOs/CXOs, because that level of seniority is inevitably a 24 hour job, as anything can happen anytime that might demand their immediate attention.?

The unfortunate reality is hard to digest and a bit contradictory from all management and organisational behaviour theories and models. The fact is, conscious leaders are raised better, they are conscious because of their value system and their upbringing. A conscious leader was a conscious employee, a conscious student and a conscious person as a whole, in all aspects of life. It is extremely difficult to ‘make’ a conscious leader. A conscious person is conscious, no matter where they are. Since companies actually mean ‘Ethical Leaders’ when they use the term ‘Conscious Leaders’, integrity of a person becomes critical, integrity as a basic value of a person.

It is obvious that you cannot just convince an unethical person to suddenly become ethical, because you have taught them something and made them go through a few activities. However, the culture of a company has a chance here to be able to drive this down and maybe help its employees imbibe integrity into their value system. Thus, the process of creating ‘Conscious(Ethical) Leaders’ actually starts from the day an employee joins a company. It is not enough to teach this just through an orientation, but every process, every task, every system that enables a company to function has to echo integrity, it has to be a part of everything that a company does. The only pragmatic way to make leaders ‘Conscious(Ethical)’, if they are not already, is to make it an essential part of ‘how’ a company operates and interacts with all its stakeholders including its own employees.?

The other dark side of this is some 'experts’ on Conscious Leadership who claim their expertise only on the basis of the number of programs they have conducted for esteemed organisations. However, the number of programs conducted by them only represents their ‘expertise’ in Sales and Networking. It is unfortunate that in most cases, these programs are conducted by companies only to ‘help out a friend’. A friend or a relative of CEO/CXOs or board members. They finalise these programs just out of their personal obligations. This might appear controversial or even false, but I can assure, every CEO/CXO ever arrested for fraud or any other malpractice has attended multiple ‘Conscious Leadership’ training programs. This is simply because, claiming ‘expertise’ in this context is itself a huge joke. Trainers, especially corporate trainers have developed a bad habit of claiming ‘expertise’ about any and everything. In most cases, this ‘expertise’ is not in terms of the actual impact or improvement they have been able to deliver, but only in terms of how many top executives they have been able to fool and convince, to even conduct these programs. They certainly have an expertise, an expertise in ‘Sales’, which is why it is common to see people who have previously worked in Corporate Sales/Business Development are usually the ones who make this shift, rebrand themselves, and start conducting training programs on ‘Conscious Leadership’. Since I have organised a number of programs like these, I have been a witness to t hours of useless information, stories, case studies and futile activities that top executives go through, with no change in them or how they work.?

If this piece of information ever reaches a few responsible CEOs or CHROs, I really hope that ideally these programs come to an end, and if not, at least companies approach ‘Conscious Leadership’ more pragmatically and realistically saving everyone’s time and energy.?