Humanity’s interest in leadership traces back to the dawn of history, but we can date the first formal studies at least back to the 40’s.
Since then, the world has seen a proliferation of books, courses, gurus and trainings of all kinds, related to ‘leadership development’ in particular in the corporate world.
And what do we have, almost 80 years later?
1) A 45 billion-dollars leadership industry globally, that adds almost zero value
2) Companies that don’t have the right managers for the job 82% of the times and where 87% employees are disengaged at work, according to Gallup’s data
Quite an accomplishment, after sending millions of people to ‘leadership development’ programs of any sort for more than half a century…
50 years of training, personality tests and seminars, only to keep finding out that great leaders are rarer than northern hairy-nosed wombats, that all this idea of inspirational leadership hasn’t produced anything better than a whopping 87% disengaged workforce globally and that the keyphrase ‘boss is an idiot’ produces over 45 million results on Google.
Leadership development is crap
Of course, the main reason for this is very simple: leadership development is a bunch of crap.
There’s certainly several issues with the field itself, starting from the definition of leadership, often too confused, the lack of a clear perimeter for the subject, or measurement of results that’s generally avoided, overlooked or unclear after leadership-oriented interventions in corporations. Other issues also revolve around the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate, in this case calling into question whether leadership can be trained or taught at all.
Although these are certainly issues, they could be solved to an extent. If it was only for those, I would still suggest that leadership development could be a worthwhile endeavour. But after over a decade spent inside (or close to) the industry, I have seen how 90% or more of these leadership interventions and initiatives were just a complete waste of time (and big money).
The problem is in fact much deeper: leadership development is rotten at its core.
Leadership: just ‘entertainment’ for managers
Most of the programs, books and trainings on this topic are nothing more than a form of intellectual entertainment for managers.
The typical seminar consists of a bunch of people sitting in a room, taking a lot of notes which usually don’t lead to any action, some sharing and ice braking games that won’t produce any significant change, except for some nice socializing. Then there’s the speaker or trainer: he shares some quotes, slides with purely theoretical models and statistics about what makes a great leader and everyone agrees.
Sure, the leader must inspire, must motivate, must listen, collaborate, respect everyone, lead by example, set a great vision, blah blah blah. Everybody agrees. Only intellectually.
But then reality kicks in. The time comes to practice what one preaches, and then it turns out… it was all bullshit. Intellectual entertainment.
✔️ When the so-called leader goes back to real-life from the training room, then it turns out he can’t set a great vision because he’s never set a vision for his own life in the first place
✔️ It turns out he inspires nobody because he’s not a self-actualized individual himself (as less than 3% of people are, as debatable as the definition can be)
✔️ It turns out he hasn’t become a better listener, a more charismatic or compassionate boss or anything else for that matter, because these things all require a profound rewiring of the brain and of the neural pathways that he has repeatedly strengthened through decades of bad habits
✔️ It turns out that – in order to really change – it’s required a much deeper and more painful work to mollify the seemingly solid structures he has reinforced for a lifetime, turning them into what we now call his personality
Change your inner world to change the outer
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”
L.Tolstoy
Most of the leadership industry, until recently, has disregarded the fundamental fact that any change in leadership style or ability can only happen as a reflection of a deep inner change as human being.
The industry thrives on selling theories over theories, tests and models, that haven’t changed anyone in the deep and never will. It just pleases the leaders and strokes their egos without sinking its teeth where it hurts.
The problem with the average leadership training is that usually there’s no skin in the game. Too easy to sit through keynote after keynote, feel inspired, agree with the workshop, do a little self-reflection exercise and hope to be a better leader some day.
Leadership training is a delusional promise: it’s like expecting to turn sinners into saints by making them study books about morality!
The thing is, if you want to grow at anything, you need to have your butt kicked for a while. Learning curve must hit you hard for a while, or it’s no curve. Same if you want to grow those personal qualities that supposedly underpin this concept of leadership.
And that’s generally a big problem, especially when it comes to training high-level people or CEOs who are regarded as ‘leaders’ all day, all week.
It becomes quite a hard sell. And that’s part of the reason why we have what we have: an industry made prevalently of sermons, keynotes and fluff.
Leadership training is a delusional promise: it’s like expecting to turn sinners into saints by making them study books about morality!
There is no leadership development. Only personal development
“Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakes“
C.Jung
Overall leadership development is just a useless category. It makes for a very marketable buzzword to those who sell seminars and such, but it’s mostly misguided effort.
Worse, it’s a distraction from the real personal development work that everyone should be doing with his life. Then if anything, true leadership will emerge naturally.
There are so many facets and areas one should be working on, that virtually no time should be left for distracting oneself with personality theories or leadership theories that always look to the outside, to the others, whether they are subordinates, teams or followers, instead of the self.
The real work is on the personal level. Virtually everyone still has to unwire neurosis, eradicate toxic habits, heal their past, develop self-discipline, find inner peace, understand their life purpose and so many other things which probably they haven’t even put on their radar, because as a society we’re so lost after the wrong values. But without this foundational work, the whole idea of leading others in a sane and conscious way simply becomes laughable.
Leadership development is a distraction from the real personal development work that everyone should be doing with his life
Here is a non-comprehensive list of areas that everyone can (and should) consciously and steadily work on, to reach his highest human potential, instead of worrying so much about leadership or being a leader:
- Productivity and goal setting
- Time management
- Finding career and life purpose
- Honing specific skills (both technical and business related)
- Money management
- Dating and attraction
- Meditation and self-awareness
- Fitness
- Love
- Family
- Parenting
- Sexuality
- Bodily awareness
- Emotional mastery
- Shadow work and healing the past
- Health and nutrition
- Psychology and mental health
- Happiness
- Spirituality and consciousness work
- Overcoming addictions and subtle addictive behaviors
- Lifestyle design
- Biohacking
- Creativity and self-expression
Each of these fields runs so deep, that it may take decades to make significant progress. And yet most people will flippantly dismiss them thinking “oh yeah, I know, I got my family stuff sorted already” or “yeah I’m happy. I am fine with my sexuality. I have bodily awareness. My past is fine. My diet is good. I studied some NLP books, I got this. I do yoga daily, I’m tuned in. I got it”. But no, most likely you don’t.
There’s enough work for a hundred lifetimes, but it’s this type of complacency that leads people to believe that – instead of investigating deeper and working their butts off in a few of these areas each time – it makes sense to go to a seminar where they teach how to be of example for others and lead them…
Blind leading the blind
The World Economic Forum recently polled nearly 1,700 of its experts and found that 86 percent of them saw the world as facing a “leadership crisis”.
It seems that we have built far more consensus around successful people than true leadership in our consumeristic-driven society. But many of the people we look up to… are paper-thin.
As professor D.Orr reportedly said: “The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it”.
I also recommend reading this article to fully understand why looking up to successful people can turn out to be disastrous and why many of these thought, industry, or political leaders can indeed be dysfunctional individuals too.
In conclusion, the idea of leadership development is built on flawed foundations. It’s a 45-billion dollars industry that mostly serves as a distraction from personal development. If you want to be a leader, you just need to painstakingly work towards being a better human. Because as Albert Schweitzer wrote:
