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Last year, I asked a Nepali industrialist to come talk to a group of first-time young entrepreneurs about how they might scale up their small businesses. The industrialist said that he wanted to talk about leadership.
I explained that these entrepreneurs had just started out and would be more interested in learning the nuts and the bolts of running a business. But the industrialist was not interested in sharing what he knew about how to run a business amidst uncertainty in Nepal.
He was more interested in having a stage to strut on, dispensing what I thought were platitudes on leadership. Watching him interact with his confused audience, I couldn't help but think that talking about leadership in grand yet vague terms must have made him feel like a corporate Nelson Mandela.
Since then, I've become more aware of a plethora of activities touting 'leadership development' in Nepal's corporate and non-profit sectors. Typically, these activities fall into two categories.
Fun and games: Some trainers seem to sell the idea to heads of organisations that taking staff out to some idyllic location for a few days to make them climb trees, play with ropes, talk about their childhood, and sing around campfires is likely to unlock the staff's latent leadership abilities.
Staff members generally enjoy these outings – not to acquire any specific leadership skills, but to break the monotony of work for a few days. If the trainers marketed these events as 'fun and games', nobody would buy them. Slapping on the phrase 'leadership development' lends the requisite gravitas to what is essentially a three-day picnic.
Behavioural preaching: Successful leaders are supposed to have a catalogue of behavioural traits, which they routinely employ to be, well, successful leaders. Such leaders are self-aware. They anticipate change before anyone else. They ask questions. They give credit to others, and so on. To drive their point home, trainers often share touching anecdotes from the lives of extreme outliers, ranging from religious gurus to Gandhi to Mandela to Steve Jobs. The premise of 'behavioral change' leadership trainers is that if only we somehow programmed ourselves to adopt a set of behavioural traits, we all could be leaders.
What the trainers often forget is that changing behaviour is hard for most of us. What's more, translating what one knows in one's mind about being a leader into what one does routinely to be such a leader is a lot harder.
Leadership as a craft: See-sawing between the above two, there is an option that most organisational heads appear not to exercise. That is, instead of sending staff off to leadership camps, they could give increasing on-the-job accountability to staff members, tolerate mistakes so long as there is collective learning from what went wrong, and let staff make certain decisions for the organisation provided they take the responsibility for the consequences.
Such an option frames leadership development as an iterative real-world event, which is fraught with uncertainties and judgment calls. Such a frame allows participants to adjust and modify their learning in real time to adapt to what the organisational context is. When they do such an adaptation, they will start changing their behaviour to get the results that their organisations want. Viewed this way, leadership becomes a series of real-world actions that one can practice, make mistakes with, get right, and do again to improve outcomes.
Minus the practice of the craft of leadership, it would be a mistake to continue to think of leadership as something that can be learnt through fun and games, and through lectures on behavioural change.
