Leadership: Training And Development - But How?

Google returns 16 million responses for leadership training and 29 million for leadership development

. But this begs the question of what is the best approach to either - and a deeper question: do current practices work? From my experience, much of what businesses spend is sub-optimal or wasted. Let me explain.

When I studied engineering, I spent most of my five years in lectures learning the theory and how to apply it. Steel and concrete behave in consistent ways and the physics and mathematics allow you to design things that don't fall down. When I learnt to dance, however, we spent most of our time practicing. Yes, I needed to know some steps but the key was learning to work with a partner so we didn't crush each other's toes. And, no two partners are the same, and the same partner may not want to dance the same way each time. From my experience, leadership is more like dancing than engineering. It's much less about formulae and right answers than about how best to respond to the needs of your partners.

For each of the four categories below, ask a colleague what they pick up (from watching and listening to you) about your dominant leadership mode in each area:

Language: from which field do you draw your examples and metaphors - the military, sport, science or where? Are the most-used words persuasive or authoritarian?

Thinking: do you prefer binary concepts of win/lose and right/wrong or more complex ones around constituencies, options and so on?

Awareness: do you read people's concerns and difficulties or just their compliance? Do you mostly listen to their words or read their body language?

Flexibility: do you have only one or a few leadership approaches or are you adaptive to the situation and the signals you're picking up?

Most business leaders think less about their leadership that other activities. They problem-solve, plan, monitor and post-evaluate production, marketing and other functions. But not their leadership. Yet it impacts implementation of all their other plans. Notwithstanding, many people lead from a time-worn rut of default attitudes across the four topics above. And much leadership training and development focuses more on theories, anecdotes and personality profiling. Not problem-solving and planning. It's a huge opportunity.

That's what drove me to develop my Leadership Action Planning tool. To help you work out what actions to take in your current situation, with your current team. Like a successful dancer, plan your moves!

by: Tim Pascoe

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