Peter Kritas: Mailpost

LEADERSHIP TRAINING - IS IT NECESSARY?

Organisations spend billions of dollars on leadership training every year. They send managers and manager-wannabes to a wide range of leadership training activities, formal MBA programs, leadership seminars, weekend retreats, and even outward bound adventures. They even appoint mentors but much of this effort to train leaders is probably a waste of money. Let’s base our thoughts on looking at two fundamental assumptions that underlie leadership training.

 The first assumption is that we think we know what leadership is?

Experts cannot agree if leadership is a genetic trait, a characteristic, a behavior, a role, a style, an ability or a learned attribute. Further, they cannot even agree on whether leaders really make a difference in organisational outcomes. For instance, some experts have persuasively argued that leadership is merely an attribution made to explain organisational successes and failures, which themselves occur by chance. Leaders are the people who get credit for successes and take the blame for failures, but they may actually have influence over organisational outcomes.