And How to Stem the Current Leadership Crisis

The growing recognition that effective leadership is necessary for the sustainable success of any company has given rise to an explosion of leadership training. From courses offered in top business schools to the thousands of books, seminars and private training programs available, it would seem that the leadership problems that companies face should be easily solved. But they are not. And in fact, there is a growing need for effective leadership in virtually every industry and every organization in the public sector.

The leadership deficit in the world today has reached a crisis point.

That’s the bad news. But the good news is that it is possible to turn this around and it is necessary that we do so.

The problem is that leadership can be learned – but it cannot be taught. Leadership is always situational and always a function of human relationships engaged in a purpose or direction. To learn what we need to know – we we must understand what it is that we must accomplish. There are no recipes, no standard-operating-procedures, no easy solutions and no shortcuts. The solution does not exist in either the information that must be transmitted or in the manner in which it is delivered. The problem resides within the learner, who must prepare themselves to be someone who can move others so they are inspired to be conscientious and have the grit to accomplish what they must.

The three reasons that leadership training fails are simple:

  1. Leadership is often mistaken for management. You can be taught to manage things – but it is impossible to manage people. People are inherently resistive to being managed. People only do what they are instructed to do when they decide themselves that they can and must do whatever it is they are told. There is a functional autonomy in the human makeup that is the foundation of the human spirit. Even when we break people into submission, it is their own decision to act as we demand that allows the enforcement actions to work. You can threaten to murder someone of they fail to act – and if they choose to give-up their life – you will not succeed in controlling how they perform. Leadership is about inspiring people, which is really communicating effectively a reason that they might inspire themselves. We can control people by manipulation or inspiration. Effective leaders cultivate inspiration. They cause people to be conscientious, to understand that there is a need to serve something beyond their own needs and interests; and to muster grit – the ability to work harder and do more than they otherwise might. Leaders cause people to ask themselves more empowering questions and then encourage them to search for better and better answers. Leadership is not providing people with the answers – it is helping them find the better questions. As Grace Hopper wisely noted: “You cannot manage people. You manage things. You lead people.”
  2. You cannot confer a benefit upon an unwilling or incapable recipient. These are the words of Lee Thayer – who understood that attempting to teach leadership -even at the top business schools, was futile: he discovered that it sold books and filled lecture halls, but failed to achieve that which it promised. Leadership is a sum of all you communicate – through your words, your actions, your attitude and your accomplishments. These attributes are a function of your own noble and indelible purpose. Without finding and knowing that purpose – you cannot effectively lead others. It is easy to adopt a purpose, but then it is easy to leave it behind. People are attracted to purpose as a function of fashion. We wear popular concerns to impress others or manipulate their affections. And when the results are either met – or when we get tired of waiting for them to yield what we had hoped to achieve – we move on to the next purpose-de-jure. The problem is that you cannot teach purpose. Purpose is cultivated within us. An indelible purpose is one that we cannot erase, it is tattooed onto our belief system. A noble purpose has us – it grabs our flesh and won’t let go. Such purpose is a product of your inspiration, and it is discovered through curiosity. You cannot teach people to be curious. You can only be curious about them – and see whether they reciprocate. Epictetus wrote that a person cannot learn that which they already know. Learning is a choice exercised through our free will. No one will learn leadership without first being prepared to learn and then willing to.
  3. There are no recipes for leadership. Leadership is the cook, not the ingredients. You must become a great cook by not only learning to use the tools, but by having a clear intention as to what you aim to accomplish. A great cook adjusts the flavors and the process to the situational realities and the conditions they perform in. A virtuoso cook is never satisfied with how something was done before; they are inspired to continuously improve. Assembling the ingredients and combining them to a set of step-by-step instructions is typically a recipe for mediocrity – or disaster. Cooking is not what you do – it is who you are in the moments of the decisions that must be made. Does this taste right, look good, feel right? Every potential leader is as unique as the circumstances they must lead in. You must communicate what must be understood – and then understand that it is up to those you communicate with to find their own meaning from your intentions. Every organization has its own unique DNA. No two businesses are alike. There are common things that can be managed, but the assemblage of people and your own competencies are the unique fingerprint that makes every organization a living organism that changes constantly and cannot be cloned. Learning to lead is learning to be a leader. It is who you are, not what you do that matters. Who you are is not a function of the recipes you follow, but of the questions you ask.

When you decide that you must be a leader, for whatever reason, you must be willing and able to escape your comfort zone. You must get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable and allow your beliefs to be challenged. Leadership is not just about learning to lead, it’s learning to be a learning being – one who is continuously learning and following an indelible, noble purpose. Classes, trainers, coaches and mentors all offer clues, but it is up to you to find the answers that lead to better questions.

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Phil Liebman is the Founder and CEO at ALPS Leadership – We Guide CEO’s and Their Leadership Teams to Become Exceptionally Competent Leaders and High-Performance Organizations

www.ALPSLeadership.com

Phil is also been a Group Chairman with Vistage Worldwide since 2005 – where he helps leaders realize their potential by learning with and from other leaders. He is the author of the soon-to-be published book, “Cultivating MoJo: How competent leaders inspire exceptional performance.”