Why Most Leadership Training is a Waste of Money and What You Can Do About It

A group of senior executives are finishing up a three-day program at a top leadership training center. They've already filled out evaluations of the courses they took and the instructors. Now they're grading the facilities and meals. Soon they'll be heading back home to see what work has piled up while they were gone.

This scene is played out countless times every day, all across the country. It also tells you a lot about the mistakes companies make with leadership training.

Companies spend millions every year to send top managers to multi-day, off-site leadership programs. At the same they spend only about 7 percent of the training budget on first line supervisors.

But it's those first line supervisors that make most of the difference. Jeff Immelt, current CEO at General Electric, says that when he was a boy, he always knew the name of his father's supervisor, but rarely knew the name of the CEO. That's normal.

First line supervisors determine whether workers are engaged or not. They're the leaders who assure that teams have both high morale and high productivity. Why not spend some training money on them to help them do a better job?

The other thing wrong with spending leadership training money on senior managers is that they're not likely to change much. A manager who's been plying the leadership trade for a couple of decades isn't likely to make a big, effective behavioral change because of a couple of classes.

To make matters worse, most leadership training uses ineffective methods. Companies spend millions every year on classroom-based training that isn't much different from what you'd see if you could go back in time to almost any Medieval university.

In both cases there's one person in front of the room talking to a bunch of other people. Oh sure, today there would be PowerPoint slides and the seats might be more comfortable, but Martin Luther would have no trouble recognizing what's going on.

In this medieval training model, the instructor lays out some basic principles and then works down to specific applications. That might be great for the teacher, but it's not the way that most human beings learn best.

Think about any baby you've been around. There's not a general principle in sight. The baby sees things, touches things, runs into things and tastes things and then turns all those experiences into general principles.

That's how most adults learn, too. The most effective sequence is from specific point or experience to general principle.

What we need is more leadership training that uses methods that are more effective than lecture, or even lecture with PowerPoint and handouts. We need to use more methods that offer opportunities to learn from specific, relevant situations. And we need to use more methods that allow for reflection.

But, just because training is different from our Medieval model doesn't automatically make it effective. There are a lot of programs out there based on the principle that we have to do something special to make learning fun. Other programs grow from the need for trainers and consultants to sell something "new."

That's why you have leadership training that isn't training at all, at least not in leadership. Executives can try outdoor adventure training which can be lots of fun or they can learn leadership by cooking, which probably helps the executive be more helpful at parties. But how do either of these make you a better leader? None of these trendy methods seem to do much about helping you learn leadership, but they're a fun way to spend the training budget.

Executive Leadership Training Develops Strategic Leadership Visions

Executive leadership training programs can sharpen and focus your strategic vision.

When you acquire the skills, expertise and processes of visionary leadership you magnify and telescope the effectiveness of your leadership behaviors.

In today's globally competitive economy, all professionals, supervisors, managers and entrepreneurs must participate in executive level leadership training.

Your executive leadership training programs should prepare you to create strategic leadership visions that can meet the challenging demands of leading your projects, operations, employees and the activities of other stakeholders.

The principles and concepts of strategic leadership enables executives to formulate, communicate and execute on their powerfully compelling visions. What ingredients give your visions energy and inspire people to take positive actions?

Engage Them!

Your strategic visionary leadership challenge is to discover ways of blending together three essential ingredients for added spice and flavor in the aroma of your vision:

    1) Map It - show them the avenue leading to bountiful opportunities and hidden treasures 2) Model It - reveal how all the moving parts will work together when you flip the switch 3) Diagram It - draw out the specs, structures, synergies and signposts behind the vision

Empower Them!
Most executive leadership training, coaching and development programs need to invest more effort and devote additional time to teaching the fundamentals and strategies of human capital enrichment.

Executive leaders should train themselves to focus their attention and concentrate their energies on:

    => Constantly tweaking and using a dependable, potent system for empowering their employees, associates, partners and key stakeholders; => Discovering and deploying some type of failure-resistant system for producing successful individuals and outcomes; => Turning their management-dominated strategic planning exercises into a "total employee involvement program"

In this Age where imaginative applications of Knowledge are the primary source of competitive advantage, it is foolish to rely on anything less than executives who expertly inspire and leverage their people's potential through strategic, visionary leadership practices.

Encourage Them!
The acid test for executive leadership training programs reveals itself through these criteria:

    Do leaders exhibit the kinds of desirable personal, organizational and societal traits, values and work patterns within their strategic leadership behaviors?
    Are visionary leadership attributes - such as, continuous learning and growth, an eagerness or greediness for new things and a unshakable commitment to embrace broader perspectives - embedded in this executive leader's DNA?
    Which components, if any, of your leadership agenda are driven by the human capital developmental priorities of your strategic visions?

Without a vision, the people perish but without the hope supported by:

    - Behavioral models which honestly reflect a set of high ideals, - An open exchange of, interactions with and search for new ideas, - A daily agenda that actively promotes excursions into self-discovery, professional education and community enrichment

Without all the seeds containing those forms of hope, your organization will find itself bleeding the emotional, spiritual and psychological strengths it needs to survive, flourish and thrive.

So the question remains: how will design your executive leadership training program to help you develop your strategic leadership skills, visionary leadership competencies and proficiency in enabling, educating and enriching your human capital assets?