A 2-3 day leadership workshop is dangerous to staff morale. The term "management" should not be allowed to be sullied by using the fancy new "leadership" buzzword and by re-branding management workshops to make people think that are going to be anything more than managers anyway. We need managers - good managers. We don't need any managers who "think" they are leaders.
Nothing is more dangerous than a barely-competent manager who fancies himself a leader (except maybe a 1st year Psych minor). It's distressing when staff have to endure the arrogant "past-manager" who now thinks that as a result of his participation at a 2-3 day leadership course, he doesn't have to actually get his hands dirty doing that icky, hands-on manager stuff. Ugh. Trust me, allowing your manager to think himself a leader is going to create big staff problems.
We need managers - good competent managers. And management skills are something you CAN learn at a 2-3 day management workshop. You can derive tremendous benefit from that - if the focus is on target: management. Training companies would do well to stop lying to corporate America. Leadership is not management. Making organizations believe that they should stop management training and start Leadership training is a deception. Leadership is a personal skill. Management is a corporate skill.
If you're really speaking of leadership, you have to define "leadership" to get any benefit. And since there are 350,000 books alone on Amazon, that means there are 350,000 differing opinions on what leadership is. No one person has it right. It is all open to interpretation.
You can not transform a barely-competent manager into a leader in 2 or 3 days. That's ridiculous. And any training company that says they can do it is seeking only your checkbook. Leadership workshops are mostly "management" workshops re-branded anyway - which is a disservice to real life-long leadership commitments and it is insulting to think that a lifelong commitment that someone has made can be taught in 2-3 days.
Leadership workshops would have to change a person's context (the way they see the world), their philosophy (how they think about the world), their personal mission (what they are here to do in the world) and their contribution (what they offer the world). In addition, things like vision, values, ethics, morals, attitudes, opinions and beliefs will all have to be challenged. Leadership operates at that level. Then there is the impossible question to answer: why do people follow some people and not others? You can not have a leadership workshop without addressing these issues and there is no way it can all be covered in-depth, findings concluded and sufficient time allowed for participants to reflect on their lives thus far and where they wish to see themselves in relation to a world contribution (the big picture) in 2 or 3 days.
If you want your managers to be better managers, then send them to management workshops. Don't pretend that you're doing leadership. You can't teach someone how to be Gandhi in 2-3 days. You can't teach someone how to be Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or Winston Churchill in 2-3 days. The best you can do is teach someone how to imitate these leaders. But imitation is fake. It is not real. And if it is not real it is not leadership. Leadership is internal - deep in the psyche. The rest is management. Call it what it is.
In every organization, there is ONE leader - the rest are managers. Get used to it. That's the way it is. The barely-competent manager who returns from a 2-3 day leadership course believing that people will follow him now because of his learning after a couple of days training course is not only still barely-competent, but he is now borderline arrogant as well. Yep, let's all line up behind that guy.
What you want are better managers. Stop pretending it's leadership because that is a real insult to real leaders - people who have spent their lifetimes garnering the respect that makes people want to follow them. You can't teach that in 2-3 days.
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