Leaders are the most important asset a company has. How we train leaders and what we train them in is going to become vital in the global competitive economy. Think about what happens when poor leadership occurs – companies can be brought down. What happened at Enron was about greed, unethical behaviour and a lack of responsibility.

But leadership training is not just about avoiding bad things happening. It is about creating organisations that achieve great strides forward in their particular fields. Think of Google, Virgin, South West Airlines, SAS Institute. All of them are very successful, have their own unique cultures and are in different ways breaking the mould. And of course all of them have great leaders. They are all different but they are certainly not plodding people who care more about conformity than creativity.

I wonder how many such leaders the multi-million dollar leadership development industry produces each year. So much time and effort is quite rightly put into training our leaders. But are we doing a good enough job? And what if we are not?

In this video clip Patrick Awuah talks about the importance of educating young people to be leaders in Africa. He believes that the education of future leaders needs to encompass an exploration of ethics, learning about dealing with ambiguity, a move away from the rote learning of the past and an emphasis on thinking.

This clip raised many questions for me around what we are teaching our leaders and how successful we are being in increasing the overall leadership capability. Awuah quotes one of his students on an email he received: “I am thinking”. How many of our leaders truly think and question themselves and the world versus repeating what they have always done in ways that they have always done it. How many leaders understand that to really think about something means to examine their own values and principles as they underpin what we think, what we believe and what we do.

I would say that we are failing to even aspire to, let alone achieve, the standards of leadership excellence that Awuah refers to. My evidence for this is the amount of activity going on in companies to increase employee engagement, reduce turnover and attract talented people. Problems in all of these areas can almost always be tracked back to inadequate leadership. Great leaders create meaning, set standards, have strong values and ethics, drive for superior performance and thus create cultures where people are highly engaged and want to stay.

Excellent leaders want to be challenged, they want people that push, question the status quo and think for themselves. They understand that to compete in this fast changing world they need their people to be open minded, learning new ways and ditching what is no longer useful. The good news is that the workforce is changing: Generation Y have arrived and they are much more inclined than their older colleagues to behave in those ways.

Generation Y present a huge opportunity to organisations. Yet, too many bosses are still thinking of them as a challenge and are still expending a lot of energy getting them to conform. The old model of leadership still prevails. It looks like this and it is frustrating.

• · The boss needs to be respected for his position in the hierarchy not for his contribution
• · The more junior you are the less you are assumed to know
• · It is not the done thing to challenge senior managers
• · It is not the done thing to challenge prevailing practices such as 9 to 5 working (of course it makes sense that we still work those hours that were necessary in post-industrial factory settings!)
• · The boss’s job is more of a monitor than a mentor

Make no mistake, it is not just Gen Y who are frustrated by this style of leadership (if you can call it leadership), lots of people are. The difference is that Gen Y will are much less likely to put up with it, they will leave.

We need to step up the quality of our leadership training. We need to tackle the tough and thorny issues of values and meaning as well as the essential high performance leadership competency development. Business schools and training consultancies tend to concentrate on the latter because it is easier to do and it lends itself to boxes being seen to be ticked. But running a business is not a tick box activity. It is complex and challenging. Having spent the past year developing a leadership model and development programme that tackles the tricky bits I know it is not at all easy. But we have to try. If we don’t then we are doing a great disservice to our current and future leaders for whom skills and behavioural training will simply not be enough to thrive in this increasingly demanding business world.

Sally

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