While scrolling down LinkedIn posts, there was this interesting update that caught my attention for all the wrong reasons. While I misread it initially to mean something more offensive about the relationship between a leader and an organization, its correct read reflected an understanding that was no less problematic.

But given the source of the update being a trainer / coach, it’s not unexpected to find leadership skills available on sale. Well, trainers must earn their bread, so why not sell leadership traits and styles, which sounds like the most fanciful proposition!

Yes, if you were able to think over it, you heard that right. Leadership through training!

Training a person to be a different version of himself or herself to be a leader by teaching character, trait, approach and behavior to ‘act’ as a leader. It doesn’t matter if the trainer was ever a leader or not, what matters is that you’re promised upskilling as a leader. Certainly not a deal to be ignored!

Courtesy this sales-oriented approach to ‘creating’ leadership, the roadmap is simplified; to become a leader, it’s only certain acts you need to learn! Yes, you simply need to act as a leader to become one or more appropriately be called one! What happens to the organization steered through such acts could be anybody’s guess.

That’s what I’ll touch upon in a while. But first let’s understand the inherent idiocy in the leadership through training phenomenon.

The LinkedIn update I mentioned was about how organizations needed leaders who could think beyond their person. To call someone a leader and ask him to look beyond his person is a flawed statement to begin with. A leader is someone who leads others, not himself. Someone who is only about himself has no one to lead, so can’t be a leader.

The leadership trainers sell the possibility of carving out a leader from a self-absorbed person. One might be fooled into believing the trainers will be able to alter someone to such an extent that the person could become a leader. A person who’s ambitious for himself will take a backseat to his consideration for others in response to a trainer’s interventions!

If you find it hard to grasp, it sure is. In the present era, where you might find divine scriptures struggling to exert the desired influence, we’re being told to believe a trainer could create a leader.

There would be arguments in defense of leadership through training. For instance,

• Trainers do not create leaders; they help find the leader in us.
• Trainers inculcate desired behavioral traits to help someone become a leader.
• Trainers help us to look at the bigger picture and alter our otherwise myopic view.
• Trainers help define the legacy we would like to leave behind and trigger the leadership acumen in us.

Let’s take these arguments head on too: 

Let me add another important part of the LinkedIn update I mentioned. “We need leaders that create organizations that grow past the leaders’ reign”. Merely the need for saying it means our understanding of relationship between a leader and the organization is lacking. A leader’s reign matters only if all stakeholders of the organization are impacted in a positive way.

And some of the positive ways in which leaders could impact their stakeholders and discover their leadership acumen are:

• Leading by example in each initiative. Only examples set by leaders have the real power of influence.
• Walk the Talk. A leader’s worth is in actions not words, because words cannot be understood if these aren’t backed by actions.
• Ethics and Morality shouldn’t be used as slogans, the leader must live these on a day-to-day basis even while ideating and making decisions for sustenance and growth.
• While making decisions for sustenance and growth, a leader always has all the stakeholders in mind and tries to maximize benefits for all.
• A leader should help nurture and develop leaders that share only one common goal, sustenance and growth. Beyond that all diversity, be it in opinion, feedback, ideas, work approach, actions etc. shouldn’t just be welcomed but promoted!

Do you expect any trainer to inculcate these into someone who could then become a leader? The trainers do not tap our creativity or potential as much as they love to mention that on their invoices, instead they tap the goofiness in us since management cannot be transformed into leadership. Surely, it is the real-life situation that creates and discovers the leader in us.

Back in 2015, I was afforded an opportunity to engage in an intensive one on one and group-based leadership conclaves. The leaders this trainer discovered amongst us were handed out a comprehensive road map to groom their potential to act as leaders. All these “leaders” deserted the organization when they had built their fortunes and the organization they led is on the verge of oblivion.

I wish leadership trainers and coaches could try to find something else to train, or better do something else.

And I strongly wish they would desist from contributing ‘LEADERSHIP’ to the slang diction!