Leadership training is a waste of time and money…

Yes, it’s a provocative headline. I mostly mean it too.

Leaders emerge and having emerged; they need specialist help and support. Choose very carefully and avoid anyone that comes at you with a “programme”, a list of character traits, or a test!

I’ve come full circle on this issue. I wrote an article a while back about leaders emerging rather than being trained. Since then, I’ve been exposed to a lot of people that claim to be able to do this training. I’ve listened, I’ve sat through the presentations, and I’ve engaged in a lot of discussions. At the end of the day, I’m back where I started.

Leaders emerge, you can’t train people to be leaders

I mean two things here:

1.??????You can’t decide to give a person a leadership position and then train them.

2.??????You can’t train people to become leaders.

Leadership is emergent, and once recognised, it can be helped, encouraged, mentored, etc. BUT, it is not a badge, a title, a salary, or an expectation.

I see ‘courses’ full of ‘leaders’ and I despair. Rooms full of people getting a long-winded motivational speech and a few tips about what they ‘should be like’. The whole exercise is mainly a pointless waste of time and money. There are rare people who emerge as leaders who should encounter individual and group attention to enhance and cement their capabilities, interest, and motivation. However, splitting up organisations into groups of people based on work function and plonking a “leader” hat on one of them, it ain’t!

I’ve seen more than enough – from vast rambling name-dropping discourses about this and that philosopher and what this and that academic wrote about them, to (bless ‘em) corporate refugees that have been ‘on a course’ and got a certificate, to naively fired-up young’uns that reckon they’re all that and a bag ‘o chips and thank God they’re here. Many of these people have marketing that people buy because they don’t know any different. Whom I hear you ask, is to blame for all this?

Organizational and Industrial (I/O) psychologists, that’s who! Especially ex-military ones. Oh, and Positive Psychologists.

Now, I think I/O psych and a strictly militaristic hierarchy ARE made for each other. The “Command and Control” model certainly works when you can factory reset humans and train them in an almost entirely behavioural manner in an entirely closed system… Go for your life! Under those circumstances, militaristic hierarchically minded leaders are noticed and groomed, and it all works brilliantly. Ref. the exceptional execution of the funeral arrangements of HRH Queen Elizabeth II.

People that have not been re-programmed however, tend to do all kinds of spurious things for all kinds of reasonable and unreasonable, expected, and unexpected reasons. They have lives, interests, hopes, fears, relationships etc. that can include work to a lesser or greater extent. There are all kinds of drivers for people to be in the roles they’re in. Most are put where they are, but there’s usually a desire for more money and a bit more status and autonomy. That comes with extra responsibility. Responsible for managing a work function. That’s not the same, in any way, as someone emerging as a leader.

Oh.. and psychometric tests. Just quickly, even by their own measurements, they are extremely poor at predicting anything. There’re loads of them. They’re like religions. You either ‘grow up’ believing in one or someone sells you on the idea of one and from then on, you’re hooked into the evangelistic idea that the one-time response to some obviously formulated questions is going plant a label on you that will dictate all manner of pathways for your life.

Organisations depend on the damn things and I/O psychs and the less well-educated are more than happy to supply all the horoscope-esque snake oil you can use. Yes, they do have their uses, as conversation openings, sometimes. That’s all though. Then you need a person highly skilled in person-centred psychology to work on an individual basis to nurture the productive talents and interests that emerge and help you to keep psychologically and emotionally safe. I/O psych and ‘coaches’; the young sort or the certificated corporate refugee sort, can’t do that, and honestly, they really shouldn’t try. The same goes for positive psychologists and their lists of thinly disguised Stoic attributes…

Leaders emerge. Actually, the military is extremely good at spotting this because it has moulds for people to fit into and it can be ruthless in applying exactly whatever it wants. The military needs this. It needs resourceful automatons. That is one style of leadership that suits one kind of situation and environment. Outside of the military, it’s a disaster.

I come from a military family btw, for many generations, on both sides.

Leaders emerge, but how to spot them if you don’t have a ‘scientific, evidence-based’ test to use to help you?

The answer is it’s not an exact science. It is about human connection, understanding, empathy, adaptability, flexibility, etc. It’s a community growth thing. Mostly, the evidence that points to a leader emerging is people follow them, look up to them, trust them, demonstrably follow through and engender loyalty. It’s a natural human sorting out of things. It becomes evident and it may surprise people to know that leadership is often situational, of a time, and transitory.

You can’t teach that.

You can teach people how to make and generate good decisions, how to manage workflow, how to organize things etc. You can’t teach leadership. But there are a few people that can nurture leadership and usually, it’s not just one person.

Leaders emerge and having emerged; they need specialist help and support. Choose very carefully and avoid anyone that comes at you with a “programme”, a list of character traits, or a test!