Leadership
STOP TRAINING
BY PAULA JANE COX
As a business owner who makes a living partly from training leaders, I give myself full permission to write this article and accept any consequences as a result of businesses changing the way they look at developing their leaders!
A colossal, money-making area of training is leadership. If I had one Dirham for every time I have read or heard, ‘"what’s the difference between a manager and a leader?’’ I would be lying on my private island writing this and not in my office.
At an estimated industry value of US$60 Billion, there have been over 85,000 leadership books published in the last forty years. Here are some listings numbers when you search on Google: 142,000,000 for leadership, 3,500,000 for leadership training, 21,300,000 for leadership training courses, 13,100,000 for leadership consulting firms and 1,600,000 for leadership consultants.
Why then, with such an array of resources available and with businesses seemingly willing to allocate substantial budgets to resolve the issue, is developing leaders still such an ambiguous problem? The issues emanate from the mindset of the company looking to ‘resolve their leadership problem’ and often stumble across some of these common pitfalls:
- Companies fail to realise that leadership differs from one organisation to another.
- Companies classify leadership as a ‘problem’.
- Companies hire people or buy programs ‘off the shelf’ to address leadership issues.
- Selected individuals go through the process of ‘learning leadership’.
- These people go back into organizations and are measured on exactly the same things they were measured on BEFORE the training on leadership. In other words, we don't measure leadership per se, but measure everything else around it: profits, losses, costs, quality, errors, etc.
16 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST SEPT 2014
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