I spent years doing leadership training. Here's the 3 problems with it.

Ahoy,

So you’re a leader of people.

Or you want to be a leader of people.

And you’re reading this newsletter, so you probably take that seriously.

You want to make sure you’re doing a good job, or you’re going to do a good job.

(Who wants to do a bad job?!)

Maybe you’ve had formal leadership training, maybe you haven’t.

Maybe you’ve done some management training that your organisation branded as leadership training.

Here’s the thing.

Management training is not leadership training.

And a lot of leadership training is pointless…

Ohhhh controversy!!!

What do I mean by this? Because obviously it’s not all pointless or I never would have started leadership coaching myself!

I spent years going through traditional leadership training and a lot of doesn’t actually provide any practical help for real life leadership problems.

Let’s break down the three biggest problems with traditional leadership training.

Nobody cares about your personality type in the moment

Why is this included in every leadership course?

Seriously.

When have you ever been talking to someone and ran a Myre-Briggs personality type test on them in your mind.

Even if you did know their personality type (meaning you’ve memorised 16 different personality types), what would you do with that information?

How would you behave differently?

EQ is incredibly important as a leader. Understanding yourself and others is vital. But do you need to assign a personality type to understand people?

Instead, focus on taking the time to understand yourself better:

• What motivates you?

• What frustrates you?

• What de-energises you?

Take the time to understand your team. Not through personality types, but through practical knowledge of them.

• Do they like football? (It’s football, not soccer)

• What is their family situation?

• What gets them excited to work?

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs isn’t relevant in your business

This may have been pushed more because of our military background however, even there, I’m sceptical about it’s actual application.

As a model, I’m here for it.

It makes sense, and I’ve seen how people’s attitudes shift as they move around the model.

However, unless you are out on a long military exercise, or stranded on a desert island, I really doubt it’s pre-requisite knowledge for running a team.

By paying your team you almost immediately tick off the bottom two levels.

If you have to worry about the air, food, water and shelter of your team, something terrible has truly happened!

And sure you should build community, treat your team with respect and drive people to be the best they can be.

But all these things happen concurrently.

I can honestly hold my hands up and say, given a leadership problem, I have thought about how do I build a stronger community or motivate this person to want to be better, but I have never once considered where they fall on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

This may be poor leadership on my front, but similar to point one, having a developed EQ will support your team better than identifying where they are in this model.

Knowing 10 different leadership strategies is pointless if you don’t know how to apply them

• Laissez-Faire leadership

• Servant leadership

• Democratic leadership

• Autocratic leadership

• Transformational leadership

Brilliant.

We have a few styles of leadership we can talk about at a dinner party.

But how does this actually help?

Would it not be more effective to go back to understanding the kind of person you are, and therefore the kind of leader you could be?

Then ensure you understand how to use your leadership style in different situations by practising?

I would say yes.

You will naturally move between leadership styles as different scenarios present themselves, that is completely fine, completely normal.

It would be very un-normal for you to think to yourself: “I am going to shift into a democratic leadership style for the next 20 minutes.”

You shift emotionally.

Meaning, this decision is made by your emotional reaction to the situation. The only way to guarantee you’re behaving in a style that you want, is to detach your immediate reactive emotion emotion from it.

You start this by practising scenarios!

Knowledge is fine.

Knowledge and application is where the magic happens.

That’s why we run the Wednesday scenarios.

So you can think about how you would practically apply the knowledge you’re getting from these newsletters and other leadership training.

You can’t be a passive leader, just sponging up information. Leadership is a people business and you have to think about how you’ll practically apply this.

I’ve been doing some work in the background over the last few weeks to put something together that focuses only on what actually works…

Not going to share anything more just yet, but watch this space…

As always, have a great day.

Reece