Karate by PowerPoint

Please imagine that you are asked to participate in a Karate Kumite (= 1:1 combat) competition. Imagine further that you are given 3 months time to prepare yourself. Let’s assume that up to this point you have only heard of Karate but never practiced it in any way.

What would you do? You are not permitted to decline your participation, you are only given time and some resources to prepare yourself.

Let’s look at some options:

·      You do nothing, just go into the combat and see how it goes. If you are a fairly fit person and had your share of fights as an adolescent, you might think that this is good enough to perform in the competition.

·      You pick a couple of books on Karate and try to learn it from there

·      You go to a Karate university where a Karate professor gives a lecture on different aspects of Karate, the history of Karate, the effectiveness of certain techniques, etc.

·      You go to a training labeled “Understand Karate in 3 months”. When you reach the class room, you sit down and listen to the presenter who even uses a PowerPoint presentation to illustrate his points. You are supposed to come for one 1-hour session every week during these 3 months. All sessions are set in the same format, i.e. an experienced 3rd Dan Sensei (black-belt Karate master) shares his knowledge and wisdom on Karate using modern presentation tools including videos.

Alternatively, you can go for a 2-day seminar with the same content

If you follow any of these methods or even a combination of them, how well will you be able to perform in the competition? Well, of course, it depends. It depends on your ability to learn through these methods and it depends on your talent as well as your physical condition.

Apart from that, how developed will your technique be? How well will you perform with an opponent. Do you notice that you actually never practiced what you learned, let alone, having learned how to deal with unexpected moves of an opponent?

Perhaps you can already guess where this analogy goes. Whether you want to learn Karate or Piano or English or Leadership, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. The principles of learning seem to be pretty much the same.

Why is it easy for us to understand that while these methods described above are not totally useless, we won’t have any good chances to win the competition in Karate with these methods? However, if you look at many current practices in leadership development or in executive development for that matter, these seem to be the methods most widely accepted and applied.

How is it working for you? You do get results, so it is working in some way. Could it be better? Sure, always. Could it be much better? Perhaps, but you’ll have to answer this question for yourself and your organization. It would be even better if you could get an honest opinion from those being led by you or your management team. Then you might have a clearer idea about the real situation.

How do sports people learn a sport or musicians learn playing an instrument? Quite clearly, the focus is not on telling, it’s on doing. Sure, basic theories must be understood, no question. True learning however happens through guided doing. This is usually achieved in a highly interactive and experiential learning environment. Top performers get themselves top individual guidance to ensure maximum performance.

Why should that be any different when it comes to leadership development? Because we believe in ‘natural leaders’? Well, yes, great talent and a conducive upbringing is always helpful. This was also true for Tiger Woods. Does it mean he never needed training or coaching? You know the answer to this question

As a result, any leadership development programs need to respect each participant’s background and experience and build mostly on the strengths of each individual while developing any weaknesses that could hold back their overall performance. Such programs need to be highly experiential including the fostering of self-learning opportunities.

Furthermore, a critical success factor for leadership development is a systematic follow-up to hold participants accountable to the commitments they made and to support them along the way.

Next time when you think of developing leaders, remember the fallacy of Karate by PowerPoint.