An international perspective on leadership

I recently interviewed Chris Fox from Canning International for our Profile of the Month. One of the subjects we discussed which I thought worth separating out, was Chris's comments on leadership. I asked him whether he thought that the current trend for leadership training is just a 'fad':

"I’m not sure it’s a fad, no. But I think there is a tendency for companies to want to pack their workforce full of ‘leaders’ without having any sense of what they really mean. Of course, a handful of inspirational leaders at the top of an organisation can make a huge difference to morale, strategy and direction. But does the team leader of a research desk, or the project manager of a data warehousing project really need to be a ‘leader’ in the same sense? Of course, training companies are falling over themselves to put together lengthy PowerPoint presentations and brainstorming workshops in order to respond to the demand that is out there for these courses, and who can blame them? There’s certainly money in it.

"We’ve heard of clients ‘rolling out a leadership programme throughout the organisation’. Invariably this simply means that a score or more people will be sitting in a meeting room watching a presentation about decision making, strategic precision and disseminating the vision, before going back to their everyday jobs processing orders or checking the wording of a contract. And the next day twenty more will turn up to witness the same thing. And so on, until everyone has taken part in ‘the leadership workshop’, from the post room to the boardroom. It’s not going to produce leaders, and it doesn’t respond to the needs of the people in the room. We run plenty of courses under the ‘leadership’ banner, but they are generally for companies we know well, and with whom we have been able to have honest, candid discussions about what they really mean. Much of the time they simply want project managers without line management responsibility to be able to exercise influence above their level of hierarchical authority. Or they want line managers, promoted thanks to their technical skills rather than their management abilities, to be able to communicate their own vision to their department or team and get them moving in the same direction. Sometimes it is simply that not enough people with management responsibility in the organisation are able to motivate their teams to do what they want them to do.

"This kind of leadership training can be excellent: a small group of people practising the persuasive, communicative or motivational skills needed to get people to ‘play the game’ and follow their vision. But it doesn’t need to be accompanied by distilled academic texts or statistical surveys. If people need to lead, on a grand or a small scale, it seems clear to us that you simply recreate the situation in which they need to exercise that leadership, get them to rehearse that situation, and offer honest feedback, based on a clear set of well refined principles, that will help them perform better next time they’re in a comparable situation. Funnily enough, we have seen the same thing with cross-cultural training. For years we were competing with ‘inter-cultural briefings’, where a ‘country expert’ would deliver an extended PowerPoint presentation on ‘China’ or ‘Japan’ or ‘The Middle East’, passing on political, social and etiquette information to managers intending to operate in that cultural context. We have never got involved in this kind of training, and have always had to defend our own approach against those wanting the lengthy lectures on etiquette.

"Predictably, our culture-specific training is performance based, and focuses on working with Japanese/Chinese/American etc partners. Anyway, it is now pretty clear that the etiquette lectures are dying a death, while our working with… courses have never been more popular. I daresay the same thing will happen with Leadership – eventually people realise that they need to be better at something rather than know more about it. Some clients are much further ahead on that particular curve than others."

Chris Fox is a Director of Canning International Training and Development

About Canning

Canning offers a range of training, information on which can be easily accessed through our website. Simply choose whether you are interested in: Skills, Culture, Teams or Language, and click through to the information you need. More background on the company, its employees, and our additional consultancy services can be found via the menu along the top. http://www.canning.com/

To read my full interview with, visit the Complete Trainer website.