The Great Leadership Training Debate

Most organizations think there's a shortage of leaders these days that will only get worse over time. The obvious solution to this scarcity is to develop more leaders. What's much less obvious – and therefore widely debated – is how to create effective leadership development programs.
Three quarters of the world's companies worry that they won't be able to staff strategic leadership positions over the next five years, according to management training company Development Dimensions International (DDI). By 2005, 20% of top management jobs and 25% of middle management positions will be vacant, suggests DDI's research.
Many organizations are reacting to such dire numbers by putting more managers through development programs, according to a new survey conducted by Training magazine and the American Management Association (AMA). Compared with five years ago, the number of managers in leadership development has increased in 45% of surveyed companies and decreased in just 8%. But just how should such programs be designed? That's the key question in a continuing debate outlined in a recent Training article called "Where Do Leaders Come From?"
The Training/AMA survey found that 97% of surveyed companies use traditional classroom instruction and 83% employ conferences and meetings. But some of the world's most notable experts think that leaders just can't be produced in comfortable classrooms and seminars. In fact, boot camp is a better training model, according to Prof. Noel Tichy of the University of Michigan and a designer of the often-imitated leadership training at GE. Forget the Ivy League or best practices. That's old news from a bygone time. Tichy advocates "action learning," which means giving managers real-world work assignments that are crucial to the organization.
"If you look at the research, 80% of leadership development is life experiences on the job, and the majority of what [GE managers] needed to learn was out there in the power systems or jet engine groups. So we put them to work on real projects with some guidance and a lot of expectation," Tichy says in Training magazine. "You push them to their limit. Go talk to the people who train Navy S.E.A.L.s of special operation forces. My advice is to load an additional 30% onto their normal workload."
But even some other advocates of experiential learning feel uneasy about such advice. Prof. Morgan McCall, former director of research at the Center for Creative Leadership, is known for pioneering research demonstrating the importance of learning leadership through experience and practice. Yet, he cautions, "Put an action-oriented executive under pressure, and they resort to what worked before. They don't risk. They don't reflect. And I'm not sure they develop any new skills." He notes that "even the best and most successful leaders have needed help in converting those experiences into lessons learned and understanding their personal strengths and weaknesses."
Others agree that reflection can be key. Henry Mintzberg, management professor at McGill University in Montreal, thinks that the high-pressure action-learning boot camp model is a misguided fad. "Our view is that the managers live boot camp every day. The last thing in the world they need is more boot camp," Mintzberg says. "You don't learn the important subtleties at gunpoint." While agreeing that leaders can't be created in a classroom, he believes that leaders need the space to step back and think about their experiences. Mintzberg has helped create a new degree program called the International Master's in Practicing Management, which includes contemplation and an exchange of ideas with other participants.
Of course, neither action learning nor more reflective classroom approaches are the final word in leadership development. Online methods will increasingly take root, adding to the mix with Web-based leadership courses, simulations, assessments, discussion forums, and user-friendly databases. Managers will need to find the right combination of approaches that work best for their organizations.
====================================================

For a PDF version of the Training/AMA survey results, see
http://www.trainingmag.com/Archives/108%20August/Leadership%2021st%20Century.pdf
For a profile of top executives leading the "new economy," see
http://www.trainingmag.com/108cv.htm
For an article about an e-learning network that provides leadership development, see
http://www.trainingmag.com/108News1.htm
For more information on the Center for Creative Leadership, see
http://www.ccl.org/
For more on the International Master's in Practicing Management degree, see
http://www.impm.org/
The Center for Leadership and Change Management, an independently managed Web site hosted by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, is at
http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/welcome/index.shtml