We have a dearth of good leadership, and we all suffer for it. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Leadership, like medicine, music, engineering, business, politics, and other fields of endeavor, needs to be learned and developed. So why don’t we have more good leadership? There are three reasons for this dearth. The good news is that all of them can be corrected.
Leadership training is taught too late
The first problem is that we start too late in a person’s life to teach leadership. Leadership is a people business that involves influencing others to achieve something they could not do on their own. We teach science, reading, mathematics, history, and a host of other subjects before we graduate from high school. Then we specialize in a major in college (or a trade) to become more proficient in a field of endeavor. Once we get really good at it (usually in our 20s or 30s) some genius decides we should be made a leader of a group involved in that endeavor and designate them as the leader (or boss) of the group. And what happens? They struggle. Why do they struggle? Because no one has bothered to teach them along the way how to lead. Trial and error works, but it is not an efficient way to get the job done. This can change as we provide leadership training along the way to develop talent in a specific field of endeavor. It’s not that the subject matter is too difficult to handle; it’s just that we don’t bother to teach it before we demand that it be applied effectively.
How leadership training focuses on the wrong things
The second problem is that leadership training focuses too much on the wrong things. Today’s literature is full of books, seminars, and training sessions that are obsessed with the personal characteristics of “successful” leaders. While many of these “traits” can be useful for aspiring leaders to emulate, they lack any context for their implementation. Think about the following examples. Did Patton have the same personality and leadership style as Gandhi? What about Churchill and Mandela? Did MacArthur and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have the same personality and style of leadership? Obviously not. In addition, all of the great leaders mentioned above were effective leaders despite some less-than-endearing personality quirks and habits. Some were harsh and demanding, some tended to over-imbibe, some resorted to violence, some were unfaithful in marriage, etc. Yet all are widely accepted as great leaders. So, suppose outstanding leadership can be provided by a multitude of styles and by a multitude of different personalities. How can personality and style be the defining characteristics for an aspiring leader to emulate? It isn’t. There has to be more at play.
What leadership training lacks
Lastly, the vast majority of leadership “training” lacks a fundamental feature – comprehensiveness. That is because most of it focuses on isolating a few key “traits” or “characteristics” of any individual, without regard for situations where leadership is required. That is, the training lacks a comprehensive context for applying leadership. In simplest terms, we talk about the icing, not the cake. We focus on the sizzle, not the steak. This, too, can be changed by focusing not on who the leader is or what their personal attributes are, but focusing on WHAT LEADERS DO instead. No personal characteristic matters a whit in leadership unless it results in an action that improves a group’s ability to do something they could not do on their own. It is what the leader DOES that matters. So, where is a comprehensive map of those actions? In fact, there may be more than one adequate map. After all, there is more than one way to skin a cat, as the adage goes. Below is one map of actions to describe leadership. It is called the Power of 3 Leadership Paradigm and is divided into three levels: Foundation, Challenges, and Achievement. And none of these levels or their constituent elements are that hard to understand. But as a leader, you must be committed to the ACTIONS that motivate your followers to perform better together than they could ever do on their own. That is what leaders DO.
