According to the American Society of Training and Development, U.S.A. companies and organizations, profit and nonprofit, spend more than $170 Billion annually on leadership-based curriculum and training.
“Training” is the number one reason leadership development fails.
You don’t train leaders, you develop leaders. You train animals who have very little, if any, reasoning power.  When you treat people, especially your future leaders, like animals and try to train them rather than develop them as independent thinkers, your leadership development grinds to a halt.
Training presumes the need for indoctrination on systems, processes and techniques assuming all of that is “doing things the right way.” These things have value, but they have little to do with leadership development. It’s more like management training than leadership development.
Training workshops are too often by the book, one dimensional, one directional and one size fits all. This describes an authoritarian process that imposes static and usually outdated information, but does little to develop leaders who can create a compelling future, build a passionate team and find a way to win without a manual.
Most over-priced training workshops are presented by an untested and inexperienced professional presenter using a monologue and rarely goes off script. Scripts contain good training information, but battle-tested veterans are still your best bet for developing future leaders. It’s called “Follow the leader,” not follow the book.
Worst of all, this training usually occurs in a classroom driven by someone else’s “best practices,” not the needs of your future leaders. You cannot develop a leader in a classroom, seminar or workshop. Those venues are for dispensing information and then testing to see if the participants understand that generic information.
Leaders are developed under live fire. Leaders need good information, however, if you want to know if they really understand it, see how they do when the bullets are flying. There’s an old parable that says, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him how to fish and he eats for a lifetime.”
The same is true for leadership. Develop a leader for a generation and that generation thrives. Develop leaders in every generation and that organization thrives for many generations to come.
Never let your desire to “grow” your organization distract you from your main purpose, developing new leaders. Leaders that create a new path forward, not managers attracting followers who only make the current ruts deeper. Sustainable growth always outlasts explosive growth.
“Praised be the Lord, who has allowed me to see a successor on my throne today.” 1 Kings 1:47
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