What if leadership can’t be taught?
During a conversation with the Wayfinder Nainoa Thompson in Hawaii last week the realization of the futility of using the classroom to teach leadership impacted me with new force.
As Nainoa described some of his voyages where he navigated without any modern navigation tools finding tiny islands dotted throughout the vast Pacific the thought occurred to me that trying to teach leadership in a sterile classroom environment is like trying to prepare a soccer team using only the changeroom. This is where our preoccupation with a content-driven approach to education has led us. I am not suggesting that the classroom has no place but rather simply asking whether it has assumed far too important a role resulting in ‘leaders’ well able to articulate leadership but who fail to live it.
At one point Nainoa described how the only way to navigate the doldrums was to do so with his eyes closed! Navigation came from within and from fearing this particular stretch of the voyage he now welcomes it as getting ‘lost’ was the best way to learn. I asked myself when last I was willing to ‘get lost’ – confront my fears – so as to learn lessons that can only be learnt in such a state.
What if we have leadership development all wrong? I suspect that for the most part, we have!
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This question came across my radar today Keith. I am reading a new book by Dr Caroline Leaf called Switch on your Brain. Will Blog about it later this week. In there she states that teaching Outcome based ways both in schools and in business we are setting the end result and then working back to what we want the student to know. In reality we know in this diverse ever changing world that we need an internal compass that helps us find our way sometimes by using intuition and gut rather than knowledge.
By setting the bar we deprive the student the right and opportunity to explore what may happen.
Dave Snowden’s Cynefin methodology has a unique approach to leadership development base on exposing leaders to good and bad stories about their leadership style and confronting them with the realities of how their people really view them.
It also involves a ‘deep immersion’ exercise where leaders are taken completely out of their comfort zones to attempt to break them out of their pattern entrainment – similar to what happens in the BBC’s ‘Back to the Floor’ television series.
Maybe this type of experiential leadership development combined with story is a better way of developing leaders who will indeed ‘practice what they preach’?
As an aside, I recall seeing an educational show in which Polynesians demonstrated how they could navigate the waters, even in darkness, with clouds (otherwise they used the sun and stars). They knew what the predominate angle of the waves should be to their boats if they wanted to go to a certain island.
About leaders: I think not everyone is a leader, at least in the way most people mean it in the business world. Most are followers, but have other qualities, such as writing skill, creativity, or others. Being a true leader, in my opinion, is knowing enough to find out what the ‘followers’ are worth, what they can contribute, and how they can use this to the company’s advantage. Sadly, this is often lacking.